of the Hexmachina was being absorbed slowly into the ground, the featureless white plain that bore their weight becoming an albino quicksand.
‘Stay back,’ shouted the Hexmachina as Molly ran towards the god-machine. ‘The purpose of this mental construct is to allow us to communicate without your position being traced. Do not touch my avatar’s skin, or my attackers will be able to mark your position.’
‘What is happening to you?’
‘I am being frozen,’ cried the Hexmachina, its female voice growing fainter. ‘Sealed within the heart of the Earth inside a tomb of modified diamond-lattice carbons. I have never seen the building blocks of matter being manipulated so adroitly, my own powers leeched, vampirized, to strengthen the bonds of my captivity.’
‘But you must be able to escape,’ pleaded Molly. ‘In the name of the Circle, you’re the Hexmachina. Who has the might to trap you?’
‘Locusts, despoilers. What are they, indeed? It is almost as if they understand the principles of my construction, but that would mean … no, no it cannot be …’
‘Please!’ Molly tried to scrabble around the featureless floor, searching for a way to stop the Hexmachina from disappearing.
‘You must stop them, Molly, my beautiful young operator,’ whispered the child’s face, rising up the side of the Hexmachina’s hull as the god-machine was submerged. ‘You alone, this time. I cannot help you in this struggle. Seek out the scheme of defence: together you may be able to save Jackals.’
‘I haven’t seen Oliver Brooks for years,’ said Molly. ‘Not since he started wearing that stupid hood and scaring the constabulary out in the shires.’
The child’s face, the Hexmachina’s body, had almost disappeared. ‘You – this – the comet, it is the—’
With a snap reality returned and Molly found herself lying in the gutter in the shadow of the hansom cab, Commodore Black splashing crimson-tinged rainwater over her face.
‘Ah, lass, I told you that you’ve been working too hard on your novels, too much time spent crouching over a writing table, knocking around the dusty corridors of Tock House with the likes of Coppertracks and myself, rather than accepting the invitations of those gentlemen callers whose cards pile up unanswered in our hall.’
Blood was running down Molly’s face, her nose leaking a stream of it. ‘The Hood-o’the-marsh, Oliver Brooks.’
‘That dark fey lad?’ The commodore helped lift Molly to her feet, passing her across to Coppertracks, the steamman already inside the carriage. ‘Let’s not talk of that wicked lad, Molly Templar. We’re well shot of him. Oliver’s good for a tale of highwaymanship in one of your penny dreadfuls, but let’s not have him hiding out in the warmth of Tock House again. No, one outlaw on the run from the cruel House of Guardians is enough sheltering under our fine roof.’
‘I fear you have struck your head, Molly softbody,’ said Coppertracks. ‘One of your fastblood fevers, perhaps? Shall I send for a doctor of medicine?’
Molly shook her head. The fever was in her veins, blood that still fizzed with the tiny symbiote machines of the Hexmachina. The Kingdom of Jackals was threatened once more.
But threatened by what?
Opening the curtains wide enough to see the drops of red rain rolling down the windows, the woman gripped the threadbare fabric nervously and tutted in disgust. She hated the bleeding stuff, filthy red rain that would stain your dress – the normal variety was bad enough. Rain, bringing the risk of fevers and time spent off the job. Time not earning money. And here it was again. Rain that might wake up her mark if it drummed down too hard on the roof above. She glanced back inside the bedroom. Thank the Circle, he was still snoring. Down in the lane outside a figure moved from the shadows and crossed to her side of the street, stepping over a gutter quickly filling with a torrent from the crimson downpour. There weren’t many people out late enough to witness what the two of them were about to do, which was just peachy by her. She slipped out of the bedroom and into the corridor, stepping lightly so the floorboards wouldn’t squeak.
She always murdered her victims on her second visit, the first being a sizing-up – so to speak – of the mark’s valuables. Although in this instance there almost hadn’t been a second visit from her; the Circle knows, the absence of anything of value and the dilapidated state of the apartment had given the lie to all the tales she had heard about the apartment’s owner from the tavern’s drinkers. That her mark came from a wealthy upland family, that they had purchased him a commission in the regiments down on the southern border. That he was some sort of war hero. Connor of Cassarabia, that’s what the others called him, half-jokingly, as he drank himself into oblivion. The great Duncan bloody Connor getting bladdered in the corner of their jinn house every night.
Well, all that family money had to have gone somewhere. Yes, she had nearly dismissed her scheme of murder when the bailiffs had arrived during her first visit to the hero’s home, banging on the door of the lodgings and shouting through the letterbox about the unpaid bills at the butcher’s, the tailor’s, the vintner’s. She had been witness to enough similar scenes from her own life to know that the embrace of the debtors’ prison – the dreaded sponging house – wasn’t too far off for this so-called war hero. But then she had seen the ex-soldier hide his little travel case, the hard leather shell not much of a treasure chest, but never kept too far away from him when he was at home. There had to be valuables inside the case, she could feel it with every iota of her street-sharp senses. A man with a suitcase, living alone and half-mad, he was almost begging to be robbed and murdered.
A gust of rain blew in from outside as she opened the front door. Her thug glanced up the empty stairs. ‘He asleep then?’
‘Five pints of jinn and an hour biting the pillow with me, what do you think?’
The thug pulled a garrotte out of his heavily patched coat, a thin, rusty hang of wire between two wooden handles. ‘I think you should find that suitcase you were so full of yourself about.’
‘It’s in the cupboard in his bedroom.’
‘Right,’ whispered the thug, taking his not inconsiderable bulk up the stairs. ‘After I’ve done him, I’ll take him down to the waters of the Gambleflowers and toss him in. By the time the river crabs and eels have had their meal, his own mother wouldn’t know him – or want to.’
She felt a little shiver of excitement. The murder was always exciting, that little tug of power over life and death. It was a power she lacked in almost every other area of her life. Swinging open the bedroom door, there was enough light from the oil lamp’s dwindling reservoir to see her thug moving across to the ex-soldier’s bed. She levered open the cupboard and, finding the suitcase, lifted it out and placed it on the floor. It certainly felt heavy enough. Family silver? Gold gewgaws looted from one of the battlefields down south? Enough to keep her from the company of the other working girls down in the jinn house for a good few months, hopefully.
Her man was about to slip the wire around the uplander’s neck and send him along the Circle when she opened the suitcase. And saw what was inside. And screamed.
Duncan Connor was up and out of the thug’s grasp far quicker than anyone with five pints of jinn sloshing around their body had a right to be. Her thug kept a long knife for the difficult ones, the ones who wouldn’t go quickly, but the ex-soldier’s sheet was off the bed, turned into a matador’s cloak, concealing him from her man’s blade, before becoming a whip,
