by Stephen Hunt
‘This can’t be a reply to my communication, it’s the same message repeating on a loop, over and over.’
‘A loop?’ said Molly. ‘Who would want to put a message on a loop?’
‘The logical inference would be someone who needs assistance, possibly someone who has long been deactivate and unable to switch their transmission off.’
‘How long do you think it will take you to translate it?’
‘No time at all,’ said Coppertracks. ‘The message is in binary mathematics and transmitted using something similar to crystalgrid code, dashes and dots that any station operator in the capital could understand. It carries a table key at the front based on the periodic table with the translation of their language.’
Molly hardly dared to ask the next question. ‘And it says …?’
‘They are coming,’ said Coppertracks. ‘That is all it says. Over and over again. They are coming.’
The steamman and Molly stared up at the Kingdom of Jackals’ grey cloudy sky, Molly imagining that she could see Kaliban as it appeared in the images from King Steam’s observatory. Plains of red sand and barren mountains. Vast dead valleys. A world that now conclusively harboured enough life to send them a message. Possibly their last.
A tear welled in Molly’s eye. ‘Hello.’
Molly saw Commodore Black fiddling with the rusty lock to the roof of Tock House, but Coppertracks was nowhere to be seen in his laboratory.
‘Where’s the old steamer gone now?’
‘Have you checked the orchard, lass?’ asked the commodore.
Molly looked at her crates of periodicals, news sheets and journals, hardly touched, despite her protestations to Coppertracks about the Hexmachina’s warning. Did the steamman still believe her vision of the ancient god-machine was a result of stress and fever? ‘That was the first place I checked, but he wasn’t there.’
‘Then perhaps he has finally had a bellyful of that message of his, repeating over and over again like a parrot trapped in a cage.’
It was a mystery, right enough, yet as much as the steamman analysed the message for hidden patterns or deeper clues, there appeared to be no other information forthcoming from the signal. Molly sighed. ‘I dare say he’s gone to the crystalgrid station to transmit word to King Steam of his lack of progress.’
‘There’ll be no progress in this mortal matter,’ said the commodore. ‘His tower of science has found nothing but a message in a bottle, cast off by some poor wretch. The Circle knows how long that signal has been rattling around up there. I found as many when I was master and commander of my beautiful u-boat. Bottles lying on the seabed, their paper washed of blessed meaning by the waters and the ages and the changes in language. Half of them from bored sailors tossing away sheets of their diaries in empty rum bottles for a jape.’
‘Coppertracks is certain the message originates from Kaliban.’
The commodore shrugged. ‘Well, we’re never going to know.’
Molly rattled one of the crates, frustrated at the lack of progress. ‘Then what good are these newspapers to me? I can’t use them to help me find Oliver Brooks. Meanwhile stars are disappearing, a comet is heading back towards us to take up residence as a new moon, and I’m not even sure if the warning I got from the Hexmachina wasn’t just the result of a slip on the curb and a bump on my head.’
‘The first of those questions I can answer for you.’ The commodore waved a page torn from a news sheet in front of her. An advertisement.
For your delectation, a circus of the extreme – the famous troupe of Dennehy’s Divers – will be launching from Goldhair Park. Cannons, rocketry and sail riders, in a dumbfounding display of daring unrivalled in the realm. Discover why Jackelia still rules supreme over our dignified skies.
Molly read the small print. ‘That’s today. You’ll never get to the park in time. The streets will be packed.’
‘Aye, as will the park. But I have no intention of paying tuppence for a chance to be jostled, have my pocket picked, and get hot rocket ash falling in my eyes if the wind changes course.’ He pulled open the door to the stairs to their roof. ‘Not when I have a fine view of proceedings from afar for free.’
Free, the commodore’s favourite price. Molly followed him up the small winding stairs to the house’s battlements. The top door opened with a squeak, and Molly emerged from between the two smoke stacks of their furnace room to stand by Tock House’s balustrade.
‘I have heard of these mad boys of Dennehy’s Circus and I have always wanted to see them.’
Molly looked out. Below Tavistead Hill, the gardens and trees of Goldhair Park could just be seen as a splash of green far beyond in the centre of the capital. Sail riders were a mad breed at the best of times, taking to the air with their silk sails and kite frames. Any jack cloudie in the Royal Aerostatical Navy would tell you jumping from a wrecked airship was not something you did lightly. If the sail folded, failed to open or you landed badly, you were dead. Then add to that risk by being shot out from a cannon or having yourself strapped to an oversized firework to reach the giddying heights they sailed down from – well, that was plain madness. No wonder Goldhair Park was packing them in; Middlesteel’s crowds were thronging the park to see men and women die in front of their eyes. The only reason Dennehy’s Circus didn’t put on more performances in a year was it took that long to gather enough performers suitably desperate and down on their luck to mount such a spectacle.
A signal rocket rose to explode in a cloud of yellow smoke, a dim cry of encouragement from the distant crowd barely perceptible out on the brow of Tavistead Hill. Molly and the commodore could hear the next sound, though; the faint boom of cantilevered cannons accompanied by the sight of the human cannonballs moving almost too fast to track. But the show wasn’t over yet. Coordinated plumes of rocket smoke carrying a second wave of sail riders followed shortly after the cannon fire. Slowly to Molly’s eyes – but no doubt at an incredible velocity to the sail riders concerned – multicoloured spears of rocket smoke passed from view into the clouds above the capital.
‘We’ll see them come down on their sails soon enough,’ said the commodore. ‘And it’s a sight that wasn’t always so blessed welcome to me. Have I told you of how the Quatérshiftian men-o’-war used to winch sail riders behind their frigates, higher than any crow’s nest, searching for the trails and periscopes of my privateer’s u-boats?’
‘Many times,’ said Molly. She stretched on her toes for a better look. What kind of formations and high-altitude stunts would the sail riders put on for the crowds below? Commodore Black took a brass telescope from his coat pocket and pulled it open.
But the next sound Molly heard wasn’t the soft susurration of the distant crowd as sail riders emerged from the clouds; it was the scraping of Coppertracks’ treads as the steamman came up the stairs to the tower roof.
‘I have news,’ announced the steamman, his voicebox trembling with excitement. ‘The observatory in Mechancia has communicated its findings back to me.’
‘News about the disturbance in the heavens?’ said Molly. ‘How do your people explain new stars appearing while others are snuffed off your charts?’
‘King Steam’s scholars have devised a theory,’ said Coppertracks. ‘To formulate it, they consulted copies of pre-Camlantean texts so ancient there are none among you fast bloods who still have the knowledge of their translation. The theory suggests there is a cloud drifting through the celestial void, composed of a dark substance that is the antithesis of the very fabric of our universe. King Steam’s scholars believe that if this cloud has been clearing in some places while thickening in others it would lead to the effect we have been observing: some stars vanishing while new ones appear to be born in the sky.’
Molly realized she had been holding her breath and let the air escape from her lungs. The sun and its life-giving warmth was safe, and perhaps her vision of the Hexmachina just a trick of a tired and overtaxed mind. Yes, that was it. What had she been t
hinking of? Molly laughed out loud. She had ridden the god-machine, joined with it once to cast down the dark gods trying to scuttle back into their world. Felt its incredible power. Of course nothing could seal up the Hexmachina like a ship inside a bottle.
Her relief was interrupted by a distant buzz of excitement from Goldhair Park. The sail riders were returning to the capital – but not in a coordinated display of multicoloured silks. Dozens of blackened bodies were plummeting from the sky, smudged smoke trails spiralling behind them.
‘Their sails haven’t opened,’ shouted Molly. ‘None of their sails have worked.’
The commodore put aside his telescope to take in the terrible scene with his own eyes. ‘Ah, those poor brave lads and lasses. They’re finished.’
The crowd’s distant noise grew louder. Molly could imagine the astonishment among the ticket holders in Goldhair Park turning to screams as the corpses of the circus entertainers impacted among the watchers, at speeds fatal for the sail riders as well as any below they slammed into.
Coppertracks rocked on his treads, the energy in his transparent skull calculating the odds of so many sails failing to open at once. ‘There is only one explanation: the cannon charges must have been overfilled by the circus, the riders killed by the velocity of their launch, fired too high into the firmament to breathe without a mask.’
‘Then riddle me this, old steamer.’ The commodore pointed to the second wave of sail riders – the rocket-launched entertainers – now returning through the clouds. Unlike the human cannonballs, their sails had successfully deployed, but their silks were burning up between their plywood frames. ‘Did they fly too close to the sun?’
The second wave of performers was spiralling down, their silks an inferno. Even at their distance from the display, the three friends on the top of Tock House could see this was enough to finally panic the crowd into a complete stampede, a ripple that became a violent surge as the sightseers abandoned their once fought-over places for the relative safety of the streets outside the park.
‘I simply do not understand,’ said Coppertracks. ‘I have never seen the like before. There are geysers of volcanic debris from the Fire Sea that erupt into the sky and could burn sail riders like this, but the flues of the Fire Sea lie many hundreds of miles north of us.’
Flaming masses were striking the capital now, some of the smoke trails lost among the pneumatic towers of Sun Gate. All ability to control their landing had vanished – a rain of dead circus men and women striking Middlesteel’s streets. Finally, the sky was filled with the gentle fall of a thousand smouldering silk threads as the entertainers vanished out of sight. All save one, a tri-sail rider hanging limp as his mainsail was tugged by a side-draught while the glider’s tail-sails crackled into nothingness; a side-draught that was dragging the contraption high above the streets of the capital and towards Tavistead Hill. Towards Tock House!
The dot grew larger and larger in the sky. Embers from the disappearing tail-sail finally ignited one of the mainsails and the rider frame began losing height rapidly, falling out of the wind’s clasp above the capital. Down below, Coppertracks’ mu-bodies were running out from the house, crunching the gravel of the path, swinging buckets of sand unhooked from the fire point of their boiler room. If the sail rider managed to avoid being impaled on the tip of the steamman’s tower of science, then he was going to come down hard in their orchard. The three owners of Tock House were fast after Coppertracks’ drones, joining the little iron goblins converging on the likely landing point.
Down to a single sail now, the flaming craft swung across the clearing where Coppertracks’ celestial signalling apparatus stood spearing up towards the clouds. Then the rig blew into the line of pear trees, wrapping itself around the canopy of branches, burning silk billowing into dozens of pieces across the tree line. Where sheets of flaming material blew across the grass, the friends quickly extinguished them. Splintering, the main frame of the sail-rider rig folded in two, the limp mass of the rider swaying to a sudden halt, left hanging upside down from a tangled snarl of harness belts and sail pulleys.
Commodore Black pulled out a knife and shimmied up the tree to cut the pilot loose, Molly and Coppertracks waiting underneath to catch the body in the canvas rain cover they had pulled off the glade’s small Porterbrook steam engine.
‘The sail rider’s a lad and he’s taken some burns,’ shouted the commodore.
‘Is he alive?’ Molly called up.
‘He can count his lucky stars, but I believe the fellow is.’ The commodore was sawing his way through the nest of ropes. ‘His lucky stars and the fact that for all its bright rainbow colours, this sail frame is an old RAN chute. I can smell the retardant chemicals from his blessed burning silk, like bad eggs. Treated to exit a cannonshot-riddled airship when needs demand.’
With a final slice and a warning shout, the commodore cut the pilot free to flop down into their canvas. Molly pulled off a black leather glove from the pilot’s hand and felt the wrist for a pulse. Yes, he was still alive, but in what shape was anyone’s guess. ‘Send for the doctor and make sure she turns up half-sober.’
‘One of my mu-bodies is already on its way into the village,’ said Coppertracks.
Molly rolled the pilot over. What she had first taken for part of the sail frame caught up on his back clearly wasn’t. ‘Look, a travel case! Why in the name of the Circle would you sail-jump with the weight of a travel case tied to your back?’ She tried to open the case but it was locked. Damned heavy too.
Commodore Black landed down on the grass next to the pilot. ‘A queer thing to do, but it saved his life. The weight of that case would have kept him at a lower altitude than the rest of his circus friends. Whatever ignited the others’ sails only singed his poor head a little.’
Molly glanced up towards the firmament. Only the flat grey clouds of Middlesteel hung over the capital, but this carnage was no accident. The mystery of the disappearing stars might have been solved, but something else was deeply awry up in the heavens. The Jackelians were used to being masters of the sky. Their airships ruled the vaults of the firmament without peer or equal; a monopoly of aerial destruction that had long preserved their ancient kingdom from her many enemies.
But it appeared it was a monopoly no longer.
CHAPTER FIVE
It took a lot to recall the Jackelian parliament from its summer recess. The honourable members of the House of Guardians didn’t collect much of a stipend from the state for their troubles, but at least they could usually rely on the long days of hunting, shooting and fishing on their estates. Estates that the members of the present Leveller government often lacked, so the grumbles went, hence their eagerness to recall parliament at the drop of a hat. The guardians’ resentment at the interruption of their amusements was slowly bubbling over while the speaker of the house’s lictors assembled the bones of King Reuben, his ancient skeleton dangling from a seven-foot staff of heavy Jackelian oak.
‘Get a move on,’ shouted one of the guardians, a ripple of agreement running across the benches.
‘Order!’ hissed the speaker.
With King Reuben’s bones at last wired together correctly, the lictors formed a column, the master whip Beatrice Swoop at their head, and set off to march the last true king’s remains around the floor of the house for the prescribed three circuits.
‘Parliament shall not sit,’ chanted the lictors, speaking for the bones.
‘Says who?’ roared the guardians, getting into the swing of the opening ceremony at last.
‘Parliament will never sit again, by the force of my army,’ recited the lictors, dangling the king’s bones menacingly as they stamped across the wooden tiles.
All the guardians rose to their feet, pointing angrily at the bones of the once absolute monarch, slamming their canes on the benches in lieu of the heavy debating sticks that stood racked below. ‘King of the Jackelians by our command, not king of Jackals. By the force of our army.’
�
�Ohhhhh,’ moaned the master whip, running out of the chamber with the dead king’s bones, the final customary call a lonely echo down the corridors outside. ‘Sod this for a game of soldiers.’
‘Parliament’s writ runs supreme,’ announced the speaker. ‘Parliament is hereby declared open in a session most extraordinary. I call upon First Guardian Benjamin Carl to make the opening address.’
From the cabinet bench the first guardian pushed the wheels of his bath chair forward, occupying the podium of oratory. Carl tutted to himself. In the old days, the bones of King Reuben would have been borne through the streets of Middlesteel. Then the citizens of the capital would have tossed rotten fruit at them, a purse bearer from the treasury at Greenhall walking behind the skeleton with a bag full of copper pennies for any urchin who managed to detach the king’s skull from the staff. But the expense of the public holiday and the disruption to commerce had led to the parade’s abandonment some thirty years earlier. They were a modern people now, after all.
Carl cleared his throat. ‘I have come before you many times over the last few years and asked for changes to the laws of Jackals that have been considered radical by many of my honourable colleagues and some editors of Dock Street.’ He gave a little nod to the public gallery, packed with pensmen from the news sheets. ‘So who am I to deviate from the front page editorial that the Middlesteel Illustrated News has no doubt already laid out on their composition board? I shall even raise the ante for their editors a little. It is my terrible duty to ask you today for the passing of perhaps the most radical bill of them all. As radical as the threat this land of ours now finds itself faced with. We must repeal, at least temporarily, the Statute of Splendid Detachment.’
‘No, NO,’ howled the opposition benches – worryingly, the cry appeared to be taken up by many members on Carl’s own side of the house as well.