The Song Rising

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘And to think, the Grand Commander genuinely believed you were a threat. I’ve always admired Vance for respecting the intelligence of her enemies, but this will disappoint her.’ He smiled. ‘She suspected you might come here, you know.’

  That was how they had been ready for me. The intuition of the Grand Commander. Vance had warned them that Paige Mahoney was sniffing around Senshield, and that this facility was one of her potential targets. She had taught them what to expect from the enemy.

  ‘I’m disappointed in her, too,’ I said lightly. ‘If she’d prepared you better, I wouldn’t be holding a gun to your head.’

  Catrin was observing the conversation with her head tilted back and her shoulders relaxed, as if she were watching a play. Aside from the cut head, she was no worse for wear.

  ‘Release her,’ I said to the other Vigile. He didn’t move. ‘Open her restraints, or I’ll put a bullet through his head.’

  ‘She will,’ Catrin said to him. ‘She’s brutal, this one.’

  I didn’t take my eyes off her as the Vigile obeyed. She stood and rubbed her wrists before reclaiming one of her knives from the table. As she turned to face Price, I spied a glint in her eye.

  ‘Well, here he is. Emlyn Price, the Ironmaster. The man who turns blood into gold. You’re quite the legendary figure around here, you know,’ she said. ‘One might say you’re the king of this citadel.’ She lifted his chin with one finger. ‘Well, we all know what happens to kings here in Scion.’

  Price, to his credit, didn’t appear to be afraid. His mild smile stayed exactly where it was.

  A vision suddenly entered my dreamscape, blinding me. An oracular image. Tom had sent me a crystal-clear picture of a keypad, followed by a glimpse of stencilled letters spelling LOADING BAY.

  The scanners. He had found them. And we must need a code to get to them.

  ‘You see this scar on my face?’ Catrin said to Price. The vision dwindled. ‘Hard to miss, I know. Now, my friend Paige here would like to know where Senshield’s core is. If you don’t start talking, I’ll give you a matching one. What do you say to that, Price?’

  ‘You can torture me for as long as you like,’ was the calm reply, ‘but I promise you, all you’re going to draw from my lips will be falsehoods.’ He looked back at me. ‘We prepared for all eventualities.’

  What happened next cleaned the smile off his face. Lightning-quick, Catrin brought up her arm and rammed her knife straight through the back of his hand. I flinched inside. Price stared at it, at the blade embedded between his knuckles, before he let out a roar of agony.

  ‘Where is the core?’ I asked.

  ‘Liverpool,’ he managed. ‘It’s in Liverpool.’

  ‘Is it?’

  I forced myself to keep my eyes on him. He was just another puppet, another piece in Vance’s machine. When Catrin wormed the blade deeper, he made a sound that twisted my gut.

  ‘Cardiff,’ he bit out. ‘Belfast.’

  ‘Enough,’ I said sharply. ‘We have no way of knowing if he’s telling the truth.’

  ‘Oh, I know.’ She let go of the knife. ‘I’m just having fun.’

  Price stared at his hand, panting. The blade affixed him to the table.

  He had been prepared for this, too. Someone like Vance would expect her employees to be willing to suffer, even lose their lives, to protect her military secrets from insurgents. That didn’t mean the Ironmaster had no weaknesses. And not all secrets needed to be drawn out with a knife.

  I unlocked the door and occupied my own body. When I returned, stepping over the crumpled form of the bodyguard I had used to get in, I pulled up a chair and sat down opposite the Minister for Industry. Red burbled from one of his nostrils as my spirit probed the edge of his dreamscape.

  ‘First, let’s go back to the scanners. I know they’re in the loading bay, but we need you to give us the code to get in,’ I said. ‘Don’t make me ask twice, Minister.’

  ‘I’m afraid Hildred is a step ahead of you on that front.’ Sweat varnished his forehead. ‘There is only one code to open the loading bay. Entering it incorrectly will destroy its contents.’

  The first response this stirred in me was fear, but it faded as quickly as it came.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’ He sounded genuinely curious.

  ‘Because Vance wouldn’t just destroy huge quantities of her own equipment. We all know how urgently she wants these scanners operational. There’s also the matter of how the contents would be destroyed. I doubt you’d have a procedure which involved blowing up the loading bay, risking the entire facility. Vance isn’t that wasteful.’

  ‘You’re shrewder than I gave you credit for. Already a little less naïve than you were. You and Hildred are similar, you know. She also learns from the enemy, and from past mistakes.’ Blood was slithering from his hand. ‘If you were on our side, perhaps she would have been your mentor.’

  ‘I’m done with mentors.’

  ‘Now, now, don’t slide into arrogance. Even Hildred has mentors.’ If his watering eyes were anything to go by, the pain was swelling.

  I’d like to talk less about mentors and more about the code, Price,’ I said. ‘If you think you won’t tell me, I assure you, you will. It’s hidden in your mind, where Vance thinks it’s safe. Fortunately for me, I know all about minds. We voyants call them dreamscapes.’

  ‘You can’t access my memories.’

  ‘No, but I can see things.’ I clasped my fingers and leaned across the table. ‘Let me demonstrate.’ I pushed my spirit against him again, dipping into his dreamscape. A vein bulged between his eyebrows. ‘You feel safest in a garden, where you can escape from the pollution. There are foxgloves and roses, and a winding path, and at the centre of it all is a marble bird-bath, sheltered by oak trees. You often see it in your dreams. Is that your home in Altrincham?’

  His breathing was shallower. ‘Impressive,’ he said, ‘but we all know what you can do, dreamwalker.’ He dropped his voice to the softest whisper. ‘The Suzerain has told us all in detail.’

  ‘Your family feels safe there, too, I imagine,’ I said, hoping he hadn’t seen my shiver. ‘You must miss them when you’re here. Are they waiting for you to come home?’

  The tiniest flicker of apprehension crossed his face. His pupils were constricted.

  ‘I want the code. If you don’t give it to me, I promise you this: when I leave here, I will go straight to that beautiful garden in your mind, and I will kill your wife and children. You will come home and find them dead, and you’ll wonder why you didn’t just hand over the code. A few little numbers. Vance will never even have to know.’

  Somehow, I kept my voice under control. Price’s attention twitched to his unconscious bodyguards.

  ‘I don’t think you would, Mahoney,’ he said. ‘You’re not a born killer.’

  ‘Killers can be made.’

  All the amusement fled from him. Slowly, Price extended his uninjured hand towards a control panel. His spousal ring glinted as he pressed one finger into a button.

  ‘That was the door release. The code to the internal door of the loading bay is 18010102.’

  ‘And the external?’ He gave it. ‘Thank you. Catrin, with me.’

  ‘You’re just going to leave him?’ she said. ‘He’ll alert Vance.’

  ‘She already knows.’ I stood.

  Price’s silence was all I needed to confirm it. I took a pistol from the nearest bodyguard and checked it for bullets before turning my back on the Minister for Industry.

  I didn’t breathe again until I had rounded the corner. Price had believed me, looked at me and seen someone who could murder innocents. Darker still was the realisation that I had almost believed my own words, believed in my ability to carry them out if he denied me what I wanted. I could not allow myself to become a monster. I could not allow anyone else to look at me and see Hildred Vance in nascent form.

  I was half
way back to the freight lift when his dreamscape guttered and vanished from my radar.

  By the time I reached the overseers’ office, Price was dead.

  Blood was everywhere, sprayed across the table and the carpet, pooling darkly around the Ironmaster’s neck. Catrin Attard stood over him, holding the knife that had opened his throat.

  ‘You—’ I gripped the door frame, white-knuckled. ‘You fool. What the hell have you done?’

  ‘He had nothing else to offer.’

  Her calm demeanour was unsettling. This wasn’t a hot-blooded killing.

  ‘This was your aim all along,’ I realised, cold all over.

  Catrin nodded. ‘Killing Price? That has always been my goal – mine and Arcana’s. But this was the first time we saw an opportunity – and a scapegoat if it all went wrong.’ She smiled, and I knew who that scapegoat would be. ‘Big risk, assassinating an Archon official.’ She wiped her knife on her uniform. ‘If the response on the streets is fear and anger, I can blame you. No one has to know I was even here. But if it’s deemed heroic, I’ll make sure everyone knows that I’m the Attard sister who ridded Manchester of the Ironmaster at last. Finished him with her own knife.’

  She smiled again at my stunned face.

  ‘You wait and see, Mahoney. The Scuttlers will rally behind me. I’m the true heir. I’m the one who’s willing to do what’s necessary for this citadel. In a few days’ time, I’ll be Scuttling Queen.’

  ‘You’ve lost your mind,’ I said. ‘Vance will have revenge on this entire citadel for what you’ve done.’

  ‘She would have come here in the end. And the good thing is that the Scuttlers will be ready.’ Her smile widened, showing teeth. ‘Who did you kill to get your crown, Mahoney?’

  I shook my head, disgusted with myself for not seeing this, and left her with the corpse. As I broke into a run, I tried to smooth out my breathing. Price had been wrong about me. I was still naïve, still the woman who had walked into that trap in the warehouse. I should have trusted my gut, used Attard to get us into the factory and then forced her to wait outside.

  I had to make this worth it. We didn’t have long now until someone found the body and reinstated the security protocol.

  The freight lift took me back to the lower floor. When I emerged, I could see there would be enough confusion to cover our escape. I slipped through the moving line of workhands and into another passageway, the one Tom had taken when we’d separated.

  I found the others hiding near the vast door to the loading bay. Without pausing for breath, I tapped in the eight-digit code.

  ‘Where’s Catrin?’ Eliza said.

  I ducked beneath the door as soon as it began to open. ‘Leave her. We don’t have much time.’

  On the other side, I keyed in the same code. The others just got under before we were sealed in.

  Maria threw a switch. A flicker crossed the length and breadth of the ceiling before stark lights thrummed to life. The loading bay, which was large enough to accommodate several heavy goods vehicles, was piled with crates, stacked in units so high they almost touched the ceiling. Several amaurotic workers lifted their hands when I pointed my stolen gun at them.

  ‘Underqueen,’ Maria said.

  She sounded strange. Handing the pistol to Eliza, I joined her beside a crate, the lid of which was slightly ajar. We hefted it aside and made our way through layers of packaging before we got to the final container.

  Inside it was a rifle.

  For a heartbeat, I just stared at it, uncomprehending.

  ‘Guns.’ My mouth was sandpaper-dry. ‘But the scanners must be here, they must—’

  ‘They are.’ Maria passed me a sheet of laminated paper. ‘You’re looking at one.’

  I took it with icy fingers.

  She had handed me a diagram of a weapon called the SL-59. Each of its components was sparsely labelled, as if the designer had been reluctant to go into too much detail. It clearly showed a compartment under the scope of the rifle, which ought to have some kind of capsule inside it. A capsule labelled RDT SENSHIELD CONNECTOR.

  It took me a while to understand, then to accept, what I was seeing.

  Maria lifted the rifle carefully. ‘It seems like a normal gun,’ she said, ‘except for this.’ She tapped the empty compartment. ‘Once the connector is in place, you have an inbuilt Senshield scanner.’ Her brow creased. ‘I just . . . don’t understand this.’

  ‘You do,’ I said. ‘You just don’t want to believe it.’

  Scion’s motto had always been ‘no safer place’. They strove to create an impression of peace; they had relied on it for two centuries, to prove to their denizens that the system worked, that they were safer than anyone else in the world. It was a silent bargain they made: let us remove unnaturals, no questions asked, and in return you will be protected.

  A gun-mounted Senshield scanner heralded a new age. Martial law had never been intended to be a temporary measure while they dealt with the Mime Order; Scion wanted to turn Britain into a truly military state. They were ready to declare open war on unnaturals, if need be, and they now had a way to fight us without risk of collateral damage.

  ‘Paige,’ Eliza said, ‘look at this.’

  She indicated a label on the lid of a crate. Above the Senshield symbol and the data, there was a destination. I ran my finger over the precious letters, the reason we had infiltrated this factory.

  ATTN:

  H. COMM. FIRST INQ. DIVISION

  PRIORITY:

  URGENT

  PROJECT REF:

  OPERATION ALBION

  SHIP FROM:

  SCIPLO ESTABLISHMENT B, SCION CITADEL OF MANCHESTER, NORTH WEST REGION

  SHIP TO:

  CENTRAL DEPOT, SCION CITADEL OF EDINBURGH, LOWLANDS REGION

  ‘Edinburgh. They’re being sent to Edinburgh. That must be where they’re connected to the core.’ Eliza loosed a breath. ‘That’s it, Paige.’

  The feeling in my heart wasn’t quite hope. It was hard to feel hope in a room filled with war machines, with danger closing in. I looked again at all the towers of crates, at the level of organisation and preparation that Scion had attained over the years, while we had occupied ourselves with mime-crime and ignored the growing shadow.

  There was only one way to stop it now.

  Maria reached into the crate. ‘Quickly,’ she said. ‘Grab one each.’

  We fumbled with the weapons, wrapping them in our coats. Suddenly the alarm sounded again, making us all flinch. Bands of red light arced through the loading bay.

  ‘Now might be a good time to mention that Catrin killed Price,’ I said. ‘I imagine we’re about to feel the consequence of that.’

  ‘Come on!’ Tom was by the exit, punching in the release code as the sound of a door opening grated through the loading bay. ‘Underqueen, hurry!’

  He didn’t need to ask twice. We crossed the loading bay at speed, weighed down by our plunder, and reached the outer door.

  Maria ducked through. Tom was on the other side, holding the colossal door open with nothing but his own strength. Sweat poured down his face as he forced his shoulder against it. Eliza scrambled under next, almost losing the rifle as it slipped from the crook of her arm. As the Vigiles opened fire, Tom let go of the door. I threw the rifle ahead of me and slid through the gap, into the snow, just before a teeth-rattling crash of metal against concrete made me throw my arms over my head. I gathered up the rifle as Tom hefted me to my feet.

  The factory gate was ajar; Major Arcana’s contact had left us one more chance for escape. We ran, our boots sliding on fresh snow. When a Vigile sprang out on our left, Maria threw a knife into his thigh. Tom slowed, panting heavily, as we closed in on our exit.

  ‘Tom—’ I pulled his arm around my shoulder. ‘Come on. You can make it. Just a bit farther . . .’

  ‘Leave me, Underqueen,’ he rasped.

  ‘No. Not this time.’

  More gunfire from behind us, and the ever-growing peal
of the alarm. Maria flung open the gate. A few more desperate, staggering steps, and we were through it, into the van that awaited us on the corner. It was only when Major Arcana slammed his foot on the accelerator that I realised who was in the front seat, still smothered in the blood of Emlyn Price.

  Catrin Attard caught my eye in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Pleasure working with you, Underqueen,’ she said softly, taking in the scanner-gun I was hugging to my chest. ‘I’m glad we both got what we wanted.’

  15

  The Grand Smoke

  6 December, 2059

  Another night, another journey.

  This time, we were on our way to the Lowlands.

  Hari had helped us escape the citadel. It was best that he didn’t know exactly what we had done, or Roberta might think he had been involved, but he knew something had happened. He had wished us the best of luck, kissed Eliza on the cheek, and passed us into the care of another member of Alsafi’s network, who had stowed us into the back of an armoured Bank of Scion England vehicle bound for Edinburgh. I stayed close to the stolen scanner-guns, like an animal guarding its young.

  Sweat pearled on my neck and forehead. Catrin might work to protect her people if Vance retaliated, or she might just continue the cycle of violence that had left her with that scar. I had no way of knowing. I might never see what I had done to that citadel.

  We had to keep moving – following the next clue in our seemingly endless pursuit of Senshield’s core. Following crumbs cast into the wood.

  ‘Tom,’ I said into the darkness of the moving vehicle, ‘does the Lowlands have an organised voyant community?’

  Tom had been quiet since our escape. I heard him take a deep breath before he spoke.

  ‘I’m not sure. There was a group in Edinburgh that sheltered people during Vance’s reign. They were mostly osteomancers, led by a person called the Spaewife. If they’re still there, they might help us.’

  His voice was slower than usual. ‘Tom, are you all right?’ Maria asked.

  ‘I’m fine. Just need some sleep.’