The Rise of the Iron Moon by Stephen Hunt Page B

about behind the steam-fogged glass of his underground orchard room. ‘But you don’t have to be a butcher to appreciate a nice piece of roast beef on Circleday.’
    ‘Don’t you worry about butchers,’ said Harry. ‘I brought my own.’
    ‘Sharp tailoring,’ said Dred, moving aside as Harry’s two crows got to work. ‘Very sharp.’
    Running his hands over the wet corpse, the shorter of the two agents murmured in appreciation, pushing at the skin and the bones like a doctor trying to diagnose an inflamed chest.
    ‘Worth the trip down?’ asked Harry.
    ‘Yes, indeed,’ said the shorter of the two crows. He unbuttoned his coat and pulled it open, revealing dozens of tools fastened to the lining with straps – bone saws, scalpels, hammers that could crack open ribs.
    Harry shook his head. ‘Not here. We’ll take him back upstairs and do it properly.’
    Dred nodded in thanks to Harry. As he might. Dred’s iron drones would have been scrubbing for days to remove the blood if the two crows had gone for a full dissection down in his bolthole.
    ‘Then I am done here.’ The crow looked at his companion. ‘Mister Shearer?’
    ‘Thank you, Mister Cutter.’ The second crow ran his hands along the body a couple of inches above the burnt flesh. He hummed an incantation to the worldsong, the air crackling with energy, vortexes of dancing witch-light snapping in and out of existence above the body.
    ‘What about his mind?’ asked Harry. ‘Can you go for a reading? His last memories?’
    ‘No,’ said the crow, through the gritted teeth of concentration. ‘Not even I can do that. He’s been cold for far too long. One thing I can tell you, though, his death was not an accident. There is an aura of great distress imprinted across the residue of his soul.’
    Harry hadn’t been expecting anything else. ‘How far off the map are we, then?’
    ‘Let me show you,’ said the crow. ‘Mister Cutter …’
    ‘Mister Shearer?’
    ‘Cleaning fluid, seven strength.’
    The other crow reached into his coat and pulled out a bottle, a line of sigils printed in transaction engine code the only markings on its label. Taking the bottle and carefully pouring it onto the corpse’s face, the crow rubbed the cheek gently with a cloth. As he rubbed, the pink skin changed colour, the dye running off, revealing a light powder blue underneath.
    ‘Bloody Circle,’ said Dred Lands, peering in for a closer look. ‘A blue man!’
    ‘And not from the cold of the river, eh, Mister Cutter?’
    ‘Certainly not, Mister Shearer. He’s been painted to fit in with the people of Jackals. All very theatrical.’
    ‘Not from the race of man?’ asked Harry.
    ‘No, nor from any of our ancestral tree’s offshoots,’ said the crow. ‘His muscles and skeletal groupings bear no relation at all to craynarbian or grasper physiology.’
    ‘From one of the other continents, then?’ said Harry. ‘Lots of odd creatures and races out down Thar-way. And our colonists have only explored a small part of Concorzia.’
    Lifting the lips of the blue man and running a finger down the teeth, the crow indicated the stubby molars. ‘Look, flat. No edges to the teeth, no canines at all. This creature is a plant eater. I can sense more than one stomach inside his belly, maybe as many as five, all interconnected. He wouldn’t have been able to nibble so much as a ham roll for lunch without becoming violently sick from indigestion.’
    ‘A plant eater,’ murmured Dred Lands, looking down at the corpse. ‘I knew there was a reason why he was bleeding green blood when my informant brought him down here.’
    Mister Cutter ran his hand fondly through the dead creature’s hair. ‘Yes. A plant eater. I think he would have been non-violent by nature. Peaceful.’
    Harry lifted up the blackened sleeve of the corpse’s jacket. ‘Burnt up, then drowned. If it was peace he wanted, he should have buggered off out of Jackals.’
    ‘You know more about this than