Free The Rise of the Iron Moon by Stephen Hunt Page A

beast’s chest. The beast was still shuddering its last breath when she whirled the trident around, releasing a whip of energy across a line of the corpse’s kin wading out of the sea and trying to break through the warriors defending her beautiful white cliffs.
    ‘I am Elizica, Elizica of the Jackeni. Drive them back! Drive the gill-necks back into the water!’
    Snap .
    ‘Into the water, into the water.’
    The Toad was dragging her off the prone form of Officer Pushy. ‘Stop it, you mad little cow. You’ll put his brains across the floor, you will.’
    Outside the railings the policeman was laughing. ‘She can take a slap and give one back.’
    ‘I’ll see you get a flogging for this, you little—’
    Purity stopped struggling, the terrible realization of what she had done sinking in. The sudden strangeness of modern Middlesteel replaced the vision of the ancient battle at the beach. The knock of the atmospheric station’s steam engines in the distance, the shadows of the pneumatic towers lengthening as the sun emerged from behind heavy rain clouds. She’d struck a political officer, struck him down unconscious by the looks of it. What would they do to her now? How much was her rare, wild, mad royal blood worth to parliament after such a vicious assault?
    ‘You’ll pay for this, you—’ The Toad was bending down over his colleague, touching two fingers to the man’s neck. ‘He’s dead! Oh, jigger my soul, how am I going to explain this one to the colonel? He’s dead.’
    ‘But I only knocked him to the ground, how can he be bloody dead?’
    The Toad drew his pistol from his holster, slipping a crystal charge into its breech. ‘You broke his nose, drove the bone right back into his head. It’s a murder trial for you now, girl, no two ways about it.’
    A trial! Purity looked at Officer Pushy desperately, as if she could will the dead guard back to life with the seeming ease that she had brained him. She couldn’t even remember doing it. A death. A trial. The state always turned a blind eye to deaths inside the Royal Breeding House – but only among the royalists. One more or one less in the breeding pool was just natural wastage. But a guard, not even a redcoat, but an officer, an agent of the political police? Purity had been eleven when they took Jeffers away, the wild boy, a duke’s son who’d knifed a soldier on the ramparts as he tried to escape from the breeding house one night. They didn’t allow much reading material in the Royal Breeding House, but they had allowed the copy of the Middlesteel Illustrated News that had carried the front-page cartoon of Jeffers being hanged outside Bonegate, the crowds howling their rage at the royalist murderer. Would Purity’s end be any more dignified when they dragged her to the scaffold and slipped a noose around her neck? She didn’t even have the customary coin to bribe the guards to jump on her legs and pull her feet to make it quick for her.
    The Toad licked his lips nervously. The man’s position wasn’t that different from hers now. Justifying this calamity, on his damn watch, back to his masters in the state was going to be no small matter.
    ‘I want his boots,’ sobbed Purity.
    ‘What?’ the Toad levelled his pistol at Purity, unsure if he needed it. Was she the girl they pushed around at the Royal Breeding House or was she the young wolf who had just killed his colleague?
    ‘I’m going to bloody swing for this,’ said Purity. ‘At least let them kill me wearing his boots. I can pad them out with paper and cloth; they’ll fit me fine, you’ll see.’
    ‘You’re mad,’ growled the Toad. ‘Mad as a bloody biscuit. When they take you to the scaffold they’ll be putting you out of your misery.’
    Toad-face needed her alive to bear the punishment for this; the man wasn’t going to shoot her now. Purity knelt to untie the dead guard’s laces, but the voice in her skull returned, the woman’s voice she had heard on the beach.