Landquaker Read online

  Contents

  1 – A SHROUD ON THE CITY

  2 – THE LONG SPYGLASS

  3 – THE BATTLE MAP

  4 – THE NEGOTIATION TEAM

  5 – THE WILD NORTH

  6 – SILVER IN THE SAND

  7 – WAGON WAR

  8 – TOTEM

  9 – SURROUNDED

  10 – THE DUST RIDERS

  11 – THE LAST OF THE GREEN GRASS

  12 – THE COUNCIL OF THE LAND

  13 – WAR DANCE

  14 – ONE TOO MANY CHIEFTAINS

  15 – PART OF THE TRIBE

  16 – THE GATHERING

  17 – THE CROCODILE

  18 – THE IRON MEDICINE

  19 – PROJECT TRIDENT

  20 – THE CENTRAL PRONG

  21 – THE MASQUERADE MARCH

  22 – THE OLD TRENCH TUNNELS

  23 – MAGICIAN DOWN

  24 – DOUBLE DECEPTION

  25 – CHANGING WEAPONS

  26 – ON THE EDGE

  27 – ALL ABOARD

  28 – TRACKING TRAITORS

  29 – THE CONDUCTOR

  30 – GHOST TRAIN

  31 – STAMPEDE OF THE OXEN

  32 – QUAKE

  33 – ALMA MATER

  34 – THE CONTROLLER

  35 – RAIN ON THE RAILS

  36 – THE CARRIAGE SMOG

  37 – AWAKENING

  LANDQUAKER

  The Great Iron War – Book Four

  Dean F. Wilson

  Copyright © 2016 Dean F. Wilson

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Any person who makes any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable for criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The Moral Rights of the Author have been asserted.

  Cover illustration by Duy Phan

  First Edition 2015

  Published by Dioscuri Press

  Dublin, Ireland

  www.dioscuripress.com

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  THE GREAT IRON WAR

  In the world of Altadas, in the year 1888 of the Second Era, women everywhere dreamed of a coming desert. Those who were already pregnant miscarried, and those who became pregnant did not give birth to human children. An invasion had begun.

  The newborns had no horns or marks, and so they were loved and reared like all the others. It would take time before anyone realised what they really were, before anyone would call them demons.

  These events were marked by the arrival of strangers claiming to be from a distant land. The people of Altadas called them Pilgrims, but they did not know just how far they had come, nor by what strange doors they had entered, nor exactly what they had come for.

  The first Pilgrims were scouts, but subsequent waves were soldiers, sent by a man who would later call himself the Iron Emperor. He promised his people iron. He gave them war instead.

  They called that year the Harvest, and it became the first year of a new, darker calendar. Sand swept through the great chasms in the sky from where the demons came, the dust of a world that they had dried up. Ahead of the landships went great sandstorms, until the green grasses became an endless red desert.

  In Altadas, steam powers industry, but iron powers war. The abundant metal, idolised by the invaders, and depleted in their home world, became a beacon to the demons, and was the foundation upon which they would build their new civilisation. They called themselves the Iron Empire. Their enemies simply called them the Regime.

  As war began in the east, few among the Resistance knew that their own children were not really theirs. The invaders had mastered a magical technique to control the birth channels of a people they desired to conquer. Thus with one hand they would wield might, and with the other they would use guile, infiltrating and eradicating their enemies, anyone who would dare defy the Iron Emperor, who had brought his people to this promised land.

  Yet iron is more to the demons than just a metal. When broken down into its basic elements, it provides the key ingredient of the necessary sustenance of the invaders. To some it is a drug. To them, symbolising everything they were promised, and everything they were leaving behind, it is Hope.

  As one civilisation crumbled, and a new empire was founded on its remains, there were some who refused to live out their last days under the iron grip of their new ruler. They made a promise of their own: to fight, with everything they had, for the fate of humanity.

  Thus began the Great Iron War.

  1 – A SHROUD ON THE CITY

  The citizens of Blackout scrubbed the city clean, until they revealed beneath its recent coat of red, the greys and blacks that previously lived there. Half the population had perished in the battles, and the other half were perishing from a shortage of food, and a shortage of will to keep on fighting, or keep on living.

   Rommond appointed several of his lieutenants to train some of the more supportive members of the city's militia to police the streets, and when that failed, he roamed the dimly-lit back-alleys himself, and this soon put a stop to the looting and the rioting. Yet with plans in the works to take down the Iron Wall, the general knew that he could not keep an iron grip on the old capital while trying to reach with the other hand to the enemy's neck.

   “We risk losing our foothold here,” he confided in Brooklyn, as he often did in years past. It was a strange thing to be able to do again, and it was simultaneously comforting and unsettling. Brooklyn was not a strategist, but he was a good listener. While Rommond was full of the aphorisms of battle, Brooklyn had those of his people to fall back upon.

   “If you do not move forward as the world moves forward, then you do not just stay still—you move back.”

   “Yes,” Rommond said with a sigh. “We have to press our advantage. They'll expect us to wait. That's what we did before. Build up our defences. We tried that, and it didn't work. We can't afford to let them mount a counter-attack. I feel this game of war is coming to an end, and I have to go all in.”

  Taberah had participated in the battle, but she did not participate in the battle's aftermath. She became a hermit, hiding away in a room of The Olive Inn, Jacob's old haunt. What haunted her was something different, something that travelled with her. Rommond paid the landlord handsomely to turn the inn into a base for the Regime, but Jacob wondered if maybe he was just buying Taberah a refuge, a space to grieve.

   The landlord Gus spotted Jacob loitering outside, buffing the brickwork with his back. “You still owe me for your room,” he grunted.

   “I thought the general paid for it,” Jacob said.

   “Ha! He paid for its current use, not its past. I wasn't born yesterday, you know.”

   “Good,” Jacob said. “Guess that makes you human then.”

   He hurried off, leaving the landlord to dwell on that quip. Banter came easier than coils. If only it could pay the rent. Maybe it's not so bad with Rommond's lot, Jacob pondered. At least he's a landlord who doesn't charge. It did not take long to consider the real payment, the one that so many paid: life.

  Jacob wanted to visit Taberah many times, but there was always something, or someone, to get in the way. On most occasions it was Doctor Mudro, who became an almost permanent warden of the building, appearing around corners as if from a puff of smoke. Still he puffed on the smoke of the weed, from which he seemed to avail of an equally permanent supply.

   “Going som
ewhere?” Mudro asked on this latest occasion, when Jacob was almost certain no-one was around.

   “Hell, Mudro!” Jacob exclaimed. “You'll give someone a heart-attack if you keep … manifesting like that.”

   Mudro chuckled. “I've got to keep up the act.”

   “What act?”

   “I don't know,” the doctor said, with an overly-dramatic wave of his hand. “I guess it helps to think of all this, this world, as a kind of stage. Seems like we have more control then.” He looked away wistfully, as if he saw a story unfolding in the smoke. “What if it was all just some giant magic show?”

   “If it is,” Jacob said, “we might be heading for the big finale.”

   “A show-stopper, that.”

   “But what about an encore?”

   Jacob sighed. “It depends who's left to do it.”

   “Too right.”

   “So what are you doing here anyway? Shouldn't you be helping sew people up?”

   Mudro scowled. “I've been banished.”

   Jacob raised an eyebrow. “Banished? You're getting more metaphysical by the day.”

   “Not from some magic circle,” the doctor protested. “From the infirmary.”

   “Let me guess … Lorelai?”

   Mudro grumbled at the name. “She seems to have a pretty good handle on things.”

   “Yeah, but she's only one person.”

   Person, Jacob thought to himself. Does that count for demons too?

   “So am I,” the doctor said, and he seemed hurt. “But I'm one person who might 'sew your arm on in the wrong place.'”

   “Did she say that?”

   “Not in so many words.”

   “You did some magic to read her mind?”

   Mudro rolled his eyes.

   “So you're out of a job,” Jacob said. “Is this why you're taking up door duty?”

   Mudro feigned surprise. “I haven't the slightest idea what you mean.”

   Jacob simpered.

   “Besides,” Mudro said, “what are you doing here?”

   “Looking for a job. Know any takers?”

   Mudro did not smile, and the mood soured instantly. He leaned in close, close enough to smell the leaf on his breath. “You should leave her alone for a bit.”

   “I just wanted to make sure she's okay.”

   “She's not. You know that without seeing her.”

   Jacob hung his head. “Yeah, but maybe the company will help.”

   “I don't think so, Jacob. Seeing the baby's father will just remind her of the baby.”

   Jacob sighed. “I hadn't thought of it like that.”

   “How are you doing anyway?” Mudro prodded Jacob's shoulder with his pipe. “This doesn't just affect her.”

   “I'm okay, I guess,” Jacob replied. “I'd kind of gotten used to the idea of a little tyke.” He swallowed hard; it was harder for his mind to swallow the thought of it. “Even started thinking of a couple of names.”

   Mudro pursed his lips. “She wouldn't let you pick the name. That, I can promise you.”

   “I don't know. I think I probably could have persuaded her.”

   “No,” the doctor stated. “It was going to be Elizah or it wasn't going to be anything at all.”

   The thought was disquieting. It left Jacob with many difficult questions in his mind. What if it was a boy? What if it was not what Taberah wanted? He dared not dwell enough on them to find the answers.

  Jacob followed Mudro's advice for several more days, but he felt compelled to see Taberah, to be there for her. He thought solitude could not be good for her. He knew that, though he once thought otherwise, it was not good for him. He found a way into the inn late at night when Mudro was not around, though even then he expected to find the doctor shuffling cards in every corner. He knocked on the door to Taberah's room, which was located in one of the more dimly-lit corridors, but there was no answer.

   He jiggled the handle, and the door creaked open. It was the kind of creak that made him think of a haunted house, but the dying flames in the oil lamps did not help. He thought maybe it was a good sign that she had not locked the door, but then again Mudro was his own kind of latch. Jacob stepped in slowly, his shadow squeezing in behind him. He was almost too quiet, because she did not seem to notice him. She sat on the edge of her bed, hunched over her diary. She did not write in it. She just stared at the blank pages.

   “I came to talk,” Jacob said.

   She looked up at him blankly, then returned her gaze to those empty pages. Her eyes seemed empty too. Who knew what, if anything, filled her heart.

   Jacob bit his lip. He could not think of what to say.

   “I … I came to talk,” he tried again, approaching her bed.

   She set her icy eyes on him once more. “Do you know why I keep a diary?”

   Jacob shook his head. Body language was a little easier.

   “I keep it to remind me of who I am,” she said, clutching it tightly, digging her nails into the leather. She waved it at him, like a cry for help, so he crouched down beside her. “I keep it to stop me from getting lost.”

   She looked back at the blank pages. If it reminded her of who she was, it reminded her of nothing, of emptiness. If she could not find the words to write, she could not find herself in the vacancies between the faint lines of the pages.

   “Maybe you don't need that to know who you are,” Jacob suggested. He thought it might sound trite. He was better at jokes than words of wisdom.

   “You don't know me, Jacob. You think you do.” She gestured to herself. “I don't know me. I don't know who I am.” Her lip trembled. “I feel like I'm losing myself again. I feel like I'm being washed away.”

   Jacob took her hand. He was surprised that she did not resist. The fight in her was gone.

   “Maybe you need an anchor,” he said.

   “Maybe I just need to let go,” she replied.

   “No,” Jacob insisted, and he squeezed her hand tighter. “You have to keep fighting.”

   “I don't want to fight any more,” she said. “I've been fighting all my life. Why does everything have to be a struggle? Why can't it be easy just this once?”

   “It wouldn't be worth it if it was easy.”

   “It doesn't seem worth it even when it's hard.”

   Jacob did not know what to say. Just when he was trying to formulate some words of reassurance, something changed in Taberah. He started to see why she did not know who she was any more, because for the briefest of moments he did not recognise her. Even her shadow shifted.

   “They stole her from me,” she hissed. “And just when I was getting her back, they stole her again.” She slammed her journal down on the floor beside her, where it made a thunderous thud.

   The moment passed, and she broke down, the tears tumbling from her eyes like her ruby hair tumbled down her shoulders, water to temper fire. But the tears did not douse the flames; they were like tears of oil, igniting the tempest even more.

   “The doctor said—”

   “I don't care what he said,” she interjected, lashing him with her eyes, as if he had stolen her child. He looked to the ground, and he was surprised to discover that he felt shame. I didn't do enough, he thought. But what more could he have done? Maybe I could have saved her.

   Taberah reached down to the crumpled diary. The pages were still empty, but now a few of them were torn. How many of those diaries she had filled up in years past, Jacob did not know. He only knew that when that little heartbeat stopped, the ink no longer flowed.

   She held that diary in her hands, and it must have meant more to her than Jacob knew. In it she might have documented her struggle. In it she likely recorded her sorrow. She looked at the leather cover as if she could see something in the grain. Perhaps she saw a memory.

   Her eyes were red, and her lip quivered once more. He had
never seen her like this—so vulnerable. What fire there was, it was still there, but it was a tiny thing, like the tiny hand she might have then been holding.

   Jacob took her in his arms. She struggled at first, but her strikes were weak, and her touch was unrecognisable. In time, as he continued to hold her close, she no longer fought him. The anger left her, and there was only grief. But it was enough to consume her, and to consume any in the room. He tried to hold back his own tears. He had to be strong for her. He did not get to cry for that child he would not have. She cried for the both of them.

   Her wails were piercing. They sounded deathly. They sounded ghostly. Her own Iron Wall crumbled, and there was a violent sea behind, a sea where even sorrows drowned, where even pain gave out its own death cry. That night, few in the inn slept soundly. Many did not believe in ghosts, but when they heard Taberah's woeful howls, they shivered, and thought they saw something different in the shadows of their rooms.

  2 – THE LONG SPYGLASS

  Rommond found Brooklyn as he often had in years past, tending to equipment as if it were an animal, a wild horse brought into civilisation, yet never fully tamed. Brooklyn sat cross-legged in a circle of parts, like one of the meditation circles of his people, and he polished several cogs before laying them down in order of size. Rommond smiled as he watched, taking care not to disturb him, and taking pride in knowing that the ordering by size was something he took up from Rommond—he was gifted, but he used to be messy.

   “I know you are there,” Brooklyn said.

   “I know you know,” Rommond replied, his smile widening.

   “Join me.”

   Rommond sat down beside Brooklyn, grunting as his tired limbs clicked into place. He was getting old. Somehow Brooklyn looked the same. Their parting had not aged him as much as it had the general. Maybe it was the machine in him, immune to the mechanics of time.