The Rise of the Iron Moon. Stephen Hunt

oaths to parliament they made the royalist prisoners parrot in the brainwashing that passed for a school at the breeding house. The real farewell she invoked in her mind involved the needle on the machine and the surgeon from the civil service’s stinking Department of Blood loosing his footing. Purity tried not to scowl. Keep your face neutral, a mask. That was the way you got through each day. She watched the breeder ring the bell-pull for someone from her dormitory to come and take her away.

      Wiggling her cold toes on the flagstones, Purity stared enviously at the plain brown shoes on the Greenhall man’s feet. Even a man’s shoes like these would do, any shoes. Something to keep out the chill of the Royal Breeding House’s stone floors.

      ‘Take her back to her hall,’ the breeder ordered the young girl who turned up at the door – another royalist prisoner.

      ‘I missed the dinner call for the test,’ Purity complained.

      ‘Back to your dormitory,’ snapped the breeder.

      ‘We didn’t get much,’ hissed the girl who had been sent to escort Purity, closing the door to the surgeon’s office. ‘All of Dorm Seven’s going hungry thanks to you.’

      ‘It’s the last day of short rations,’ pointed out Purity, but she could hear the paucity of the excuse even as it escaped her lips.

      The dreams, the dreams of her madness. Purity had always suffered them, but they had grown so much more intense last month, as if the flaming firmament accompanying the brief passage of Ashby’s Comet across their skies had set fire to her mind. Now the thousand-year comet had sped past for another millennia-long circuit of the heavens, but its mortal effects remained – while she could get through most nights again without visions, without waking up the guards with her puking, there was still a gnawing raw emptiness in her gut.

      Still, things could be worse. After the invaders from the Kingdom of Jackals’ eastern neighbour – that most perfidious of nations, Quatérshift – had broken into the breeding house and slaughtered half of the royalists a few years back, things had nudged a little to the better. The shortage of those of noble descent meant that parliament’s stooges couldn’t go as hard on the royalist prisoners as they once had. Why, when Purity had been ten, a punishment like short rations – shorties – would have meant going hungry for a month, not a week. There was a rumour that those held prisoner at the palace were even served watered-down beer for supper now, the iron in the drink good for warding off flu and fever. Purity didn’t believe it, though. Perhaps she’d bump into one of the royal family to ask the next time the palace grounds needed sweeping. Purity had known Queen Charlotte fairly well when the monarch had been a prisoner of the Royal Breeding House, though there was always the inverse snobbery of the house to contend with. While the rest of the kingdom loathed the imprisoned royal family with a passion in proportion to their inherited rank – bottles for a baron, eggs for an earl rang the cry of the stall holders in palace square on stoning day – the blueblood prisoners of the breeding house wore their ancient titles like badges of courage. Which was bad news for Purity Drake. Her ancestors had barely qualified as knighted squires when they had found themselves on the losing side of the ancient Jackelian civil war. Add to that the fact that Purity was a mongrel – the mysterious identity of her father the result of an unplanned liaison forbidden by parliament’s breeding programme – and it wasn’t much of an exaggeration to say that there were guards patrolling the breeding house with more status than her among the royalist prisoners.

      The hard shove in the small of her back as they got to Dorm Seven was a frankly unnecessary reminder of her position. Purity’s heart sank as she saw the line of dorm mates waiting for her return. Emily was at their head, the self-appointed duchess of their dorm by virtue of her rank and her bulk. She had Purity’s shoes, looted from her mother’s few possessions after the massacre. They were faded and scuffed, but everyone knew whose shoes they were. Only the strong prospered in the breeding house. The rest made do with bare feet.

      ‘It’s the last day we’re on shorties,’ said Emily, ‘and we don’t want you shouting the odds tonight and bringing the guards down here again. We want to eat from full plates next week.’

      ‘I won’t wake the guards,’ promised Purity. ‘My nightmares have nearly passed now.’

      ‘I was hoping the surgeon would have twigged that you’re not one of us,’ said Emily. ‘That it was all a big mistake you being in the house at all.’

      ‘Mongrel peasant,’ called someone at the back. ‘Half-caste guard’s daughter!’

      As Emily stood aside, Purity saw that the inmates of Dorm Seven had rolled the hard hemp blankets off their bunk beds and her heart sank in wretchedness.

      ‘The word of your sort doesn’t mean much to us, you understand.’ Emily pointed to their bunks lined up against the damp wall. ‘Time to walk the line, peasant.’

      There were too many of them to fight back, and Purity knew it would only make things worse. The governor of the breeding house knew where collective punishment led: it led to the royalist prisoners keeping order among themselves – that was rather the point of it.

      ‘Walk the line. Walk the line,’ the chant began.

      Purity sank to her knees and began to crawl under the line of bunks. A member of Dorm Seven stood at every gap and laid into her with knotted sheets as she emerged into the open, a few seconds of lashing pain before she dragged herself under the cover of the next bunk. Purity almost made it as far as the sixteenth bunk this time before the blackness of oblivion overtook her.

      Kyorin leapt down the steps, the tranquillizer dart shattering above his head on the tavern sign swinging in the alley’s draught.

      Damn this foul complex of garbage-littered rookeries. Middlesteel was confusing enough a city to those born and bred to its smog-ridden lanes, let alone to a visitor and his companion. A companion who seemed to be far fitter than Kyorin, far better able to leave their pursuers behind him.

      The dart’s near miss gave Kyorin a second wind. His legs pumped harder and he nearly caught up with his companion, leaping over a couple of empty barrels tossed out of a jinn house, the smell of rancid water assaulting his nostrils. Kyorin was about to wheeze something but an outburst of crude drinking songs from the tavern behind them put him off. His companion redoubled his own efforts to escape, as if realizing that if Kyorin could catch up with him, then their pursuers – who lived for the hunt and the kill – would be close behind.

      Steps led down to a wider street, just behind the course of the great river Gambleflowers. His comrade cut left in front of him and Kyorin followed. They really should have split up; Kyorin could have sprinted off in the opposite direction, hoping that the pursuit would only go after one of them, but he sensed that this would be death for him. Of course, Kyorin didn’t want to die, but he also suspected that of the two of them, it was he who had the best chance of making contact with those who could help their cause. This fast-footed ally of his was desert-born, wild, simple and able – unlike Kyorin – to put up a fight worthy of the name. Neither of them knew the other, but that was the way with a rebel cell structure, compartmentalized to minimize infiltration and betrayal. That they were both in the capital city of the Kingdom of Jackals and on the run from those that hunted them was commonality of cause enough.

      The sound of pounding feet down the stairs behind him made Kyorin’s eyes dance about for an escape route off the street – disgustingly well-lit by the iron gas lamps rising out of the gutter. There! A passage, the smell of river water strong on the wind.

      Kyorin sprinted away down the pathway, his companion taking another turn ahead. So many scents in Middlesteel – puddles of rain, wet grass in the parks, the river’s pollution – nothing at all like the odours back home. The silence of the docks was broken by the beat of machines from a tannery on the other side of the river. Kyorin could sense the stench of death, of rotting animal skins, even from this side of the water. Curse his luck. The great sage had to have chosen him to come to this city, this Middlesteel, this capital of the strange, rain-soaked nation of Jackals. But no other rebel had been in the right place to pose as a loyal servant joining the party