Stephen Hunt - The rise of the Iron Moon

Purity Drake tried to struggle as the long needle of the syringe sank towards her arm, but the leather straps on the restraining table were binding her down too tight.

'Try not to move,' ordered the civil service surgeon operating the blood machine. 'We really do need to take a clean sample this time.' He looked across at the official from the Royal Breeding House. 'She can talk, can't she?'

'Oh yes,' said the breeder. 'Her family madness comes and goes, but when she's not fitting, she's actually quite well-spoken, for one of them.'

Talk? Surely that was a hypothetical question right now. Purity wanted to swear and scream, but the restraining table was fitted with a rubber sphere that inserted itself in the prisoner's mouth. After all, the civil service's surgeons didn't want their deliberations on bloodwork and which pedigree lines to crossbreed to be interrupted by abuse. She thrashed and tried to yell as the needle sank into her arm with a flare of pain, the glass tube of the syringe slowly turning crimson. She had been feeling faint enough before, on short rations for waking up the guards with her nightmares and her cries and her rations really hadn't been that generous to start with.

'We're under a lot of pressure to give this one a clean bill of health,' said the breeder.

The Greenhall surgeon shrugged and tapped the transaction-engine drum rotating in the steam-driven blood machine. 'I can only give you back what the machine says. How you choose to act on that information is up to you.'

'Come on,' pleaded the breeder. 'You know how thin on the ground we are for fertile females. She's just turned sixteen, we can't afford to let-'

The surgeon tapped the vial of blood, making sure every last drop cleared into the siphon on his machine. 'I can see precisely how thin on the ground you are. This family's history of lunacy would never have been allowed to breed down another generation in the old days.'

'Beggars can't be choosers. She's the last one of her house; we can't afford to let an entire royalist bloodline die out. Not now.'

The surgeon absently rubbed Purity's black hair as if she was a cat. 'Ah yes. The invasion.'

Ah yes. The invasion. Purity's eyes welled with tears at the memory of it; the carnage in the Jackelian capital and the charnel house that the Royal Breeding House had been turned into by the invading troops. The choice her mother had been forced to make by the foreign soldiers from Quatershift, between Purity and her half-brother. Which of the royalist prisoners was to be allowed to survive. No choice at all, you always went with a fertile female; they were almost guaranteed to be forced to have children, to continue the family line. Purity tried to close the memory off. Her mother and brother being marched into the Gideon's Collar, the chack-chack-chack of the Quatershiftians' notorious killing machine, each report a bolt through the neck.

'Pity about her madness, then,' sighed the surgeon. 'She's pretty enough, all things considered. Very unusual to see eyes this pale and blue. Green used to be the most common colour for the royalists' eyes, you know. A little piece of trivia. I collect them.'

Behind them, the blood machine began to rattle as a tape spool printed out its results.

'Is she fit to be taken to stud?' asked the breeder.

Purity struggled at the terrible thought of it, trying to break her bonds. Let her still be sick, with whatever illness was stopping them from treating her like a prize mare in season, even the fever of the family madness that had gripped her so tightly.

The surgeon shook his head, confused. 'No, it's another partial match for her. Less distinct than last time. Very odd. I can't even confirm her identity against her house records, let alone declare her clean for your use.'

'Your machine isn't working,' spat the breeder.

'It was working well enough for the duke's son I had in before,' said the surgeon. 'And I wager it'll be working fine enough for the children I have in tomorrow.' He rubbed the wound on Purity's arm with a swab, a brief sting of alcohol. 'What's going on in inside you, eh? Your precious royal blood. We'll do it the hard way, then. I'll get her sample sent over to the department and they'll check her bloodwork for diseases and the like. We don't want the next prince to have six fingers, now do we?'

The breeder snorted. 'We'll need another massacre over here before the likes of her would be used to sire a prince. The royal family are mad enough already from inbreeding without throwing this one into the mix. No, any children we squeeze out of her will only be used to diversify the royal breeding pool around the edges. Hopefully we'll be able to screen the worst of the lunacy out of her children if we can find her a suitable stud.'

Looking out through bars across the window, the surgeon folded the test results into his pockets. They were old-fashioned at the Royal Breeding House. No cursewalls laid by sorcerers. Just thirty feet of granite, the parapet patrolled by redcoats, their rifles slung over their shoulders and their shakos oiled against the rain.

The arm holding Purity's gag in place rose with a squeaking of metal, and the breeder unlocked her restraints. 'Thank the nice gentleman from Greenhall, then. It can't be pleasant for a gentleman such as he, coming all the way out here to the fortress to see the likes of you.'

Purity rubbed her arm, pulling the featureless brown house-issue shawl back over her wound. 'Thank you, sir, for taking the time to test me.'

It was a litany, really, like the 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, Quatershift 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.