Free The Rise of the Iron Moon by Stephen Hunt

crusher walking the palace beat outside, wearing a neat black uniform rather than her two guards’ forest green. Hadn’t the officer seen the golden crown sewn onto her dress, or had he allowed the animosity between the crushers and the political police to overcome the citizens’ usual prejudice against the nobility? Maybe he had a daughter her age, but either way, the well-meaning policeman didn’t know these two as well as she did, and he wasn’t helping her situation.
    ‘What did you say?’ spat Officer Pushy.
    The crusher leant against the railings. ‘I said it must be a hard duty for you, pushing around a right little villain like her.’
    ‘Sod off, Wooden Top,’ said the Toad. ‘Find some anglers to arrest.’
    Purity winced. Anglers were one of the lowest rungs of the ladder in the capital’s criminal ecosystem, using modified poles to lift women’s unmentionables and other laundry off the drying lines hanging suspended high above the narrow streets of the slum neighbourhoods. Catching anglers was a job given to cadets at Ham Yard.
    Outside the railings, the policeman pushed his pillbox cap – oak-lined to take a good knock or two – back up his scalp. ‘You two are fine shoving around children, but you wouldn’t last two minutes on the beat against the flash mob down in Whineside.’
    ‘This ’un,’ said Pushy, ‘this ’un is a stinking royalist, and you treat them like you’d treat your hound.’
    Pushy went to strike Purity in the face and she flinched, but suddenly there was a snap as reality dislocated and the political officer’s hand vanished, becoming a green-scaled fist. The courtyard was gone, replaced by a long and windy shale beach. No, not again . Another one of her visions. The madness that ran down her family line.
    Purity was ducking the fist, moving fast under the weight of heavy armour, a trident in her right hand sweeping down to hook a beast off its feet, the shield in her other hand smashing into its snarling face, rendering it dead or unconscious. As always, her madness came like a dream, she was trapped as an observer in her own body. Where was she? All down the beach, warriors dressed like Purity were dancing a ballet of death. Their foe was coming out of the ocean: seven-foot tall humanoids covered in scales, dripping with seaweed, heads shaped like a bishop’s mitre. Crocodile teeth in wide, snarling grins. Her warriors were shouting insults at the sea creatures, gill-necks from one of the ocean kingdoms. Their language sounded like Jackelian, but incredibly archaic. How long ago was this?
    Purity’s movements and those of the woman she was dreaming – or was it the other way around? – were fused together perfectly. One of the sea beasts raised a pipe with a series of metallic bulbs at its end, and Purity’s shield flared with blue energy, deflecting a hail of spearheads driven by compressed air. By the Circle, Purity could feel the power, the raw power of the earth throbbing beneath her feet. Drawing it into her body. This must be what being a worldsinger was like, the sorcery of the earth charging her veins. The earth of the kingdom, the holy dirt these sea beasts wished to claim as their own.
    Muscled arms wrapped around Purity’s waist, crushing her bones beneath her mail armour. She shoved her trident back into the beast’s gut, reversing it to swing its triple prongs down towards the winded invader. Then she stumbled. A momentary disconnection between the past and the present, the dreamer and the dream.
    ‘Who am I?’
    The sea beast snarled, revealing its white fangs, and spat something at her in a language full of whistles and guttural stops, a language that was made to carry underwater. Purity didn’t need a translator to know it was a curse of the deepest kind. The gill-neck reached for a razor-sharp blade strapped to its forearm and she squeezed the trigger on the trident, a stream of energy shooting from its prongs and burning a hole in the