by Stephen Hunt
‘Talking of travelling to Kaliban might make a grand tale for your new fashion in novels,’ said the commodore. ‘But how are you going to get there? Will you have these monsters give you a berth on one of their terrible ships of the void?’
‘No,’ said Molly. ‘It’s a one-way trip for them here. They’re fired across the celestial darks in shells that ride beams of light.’
‘Shells,’ said Duncan, a realization dawning on him. ‘Shells. Timlar Preston, that was the man our blue friend mentioned. You ken who Timlar Preston is, don’t you? He’s a damn shiftie scientist.’
‘Cannons,’ said Oliver. ‘Very big ones from the Two-Year War. The war Timlar Preston nearly won for Quatérshift.’
‘It simply can’t be done, lassie,’ said Duncan. ‘Trust me, I’ve been fired out of cannons and I’ve ridden up on rockets with my sail rig and anything that could lift you that far and fast would kill you. You can’t travel to Kaliban shot out of a great cannon shell – the physical shock of it will pulp your wee body into jam.’
‘Quite correct,’ announced Coppertracks, rolling into the room, his train of mu-bodies clambering nervously around the bedroom. How long had the steamman been listening there? ‘But King Steam has something that could see you there safely.’
‘Now don’t you be encouraging Molly in her damn fool scheme,’ begged the commodore. ‘Tossing messages at Kaliban with your mad tower of science is one thing. Shooting our good friends out into the wicked night is quite another. Save your travels to the moon for your novels, Molly.’
A wave of bile rose in Molly’s throat and she yelped, nearly falling onto the bed on top of the cold, wicked thing lying there. Oliver caught her and steadied her back to her feet. ‘I sensed something flaring inside your mind. Are you all right?’
‘My mind.’ Molly felt quite nauseous. She glanced angrily at Kyorin’s corpse. So many voices, the cries of the dead, the memories of those that had passed into the beyond. ‘I do believe this runaway slave dumped everything he had into my skull when he heard the slats at the window. Sweet Circle, it feels like a million thoughts and memories welling up inside me.’
Molly wanted to kick the slave’s corpse. Kyorin had done what he believed necessary for the survival of both their races, gambling that the ancient machine life that swam through Molly’s veins was powerful enough to absorb the full exchange of their intimate mental sharing.
‘He wouldn’t have hurt you,’ Purity protested. ‘It was not his way.’
Molly gritted her teeth. A little knowledge was meant to be a dangerous thing, but how about an entire fallen civilization’s store of knowledge floating inside her skull? That remained to be seen. ‘Remind me of that again, girl, when I’m sitting in the barrel of the cannon your friend wanted us to build.’
‘How are you going to get Timlar Preston out of the wicked Court of the Air’s hands?’ asked the commodore. ‘Ask them nicely?’
‘Leave that to me,’ said Oliver. ‘I know an agent who isn’t going to have too much of a choice about helping us.’
‘Take a long spoon to sup with those devils, lad! You don’t have to be doing this,’ insisted the commodore.
‘Yes we do,’ said Molly.
But even as she said the words she knew how mad they sounded. How desperate was their last hope. All she had to do was free Timlar Preston from the Court of the Air’s clutches; and having held him a prisoner for so many years, the Court must be convinced the mad genius was still a deadly threat to the kingdom. Then she had to convince the Jackelian authorities, distracted by the danger of imminent invasion, to help Preston build the mightiest cannon the race of man had ever constructed to fire her at Kaliban. When the government asked why, she would have no answer save the slim hope that a dying runaway slave’s last words might bear fruit on a dead world which had already been conquered, spoiled and discarded by the enemy. And all this coming from a celebrated author of celestial fiction.
Damn. Molly would be lucky to avoid being dragged off to an asylum.
Harry Stave’s boots echoed down the corridor of the Court of the Air’s prison sphere. Behind him, Oliver Brooks pushed the handcart with a body on it – the passenger lying horizontal, his face hidden by a bulbous rubber mask regulating the timed release of sleeping gas.
‘You could help me push the cart, Harry.’
‘And how believable would that look?’ asked the agent of the Court. ‘Besides, it would be an inversion of the natural order of things. Some are born to push, others are born to lead.’
‘Old times,’ muttered Oliver.
‘If only,’ said Harry. ‘I think I preferred the old days. In fact, right now, I preferred last year.’
‘You’ll be telling me next that you’d have helped me for “old times’ sake”,’ said Oliver.
‘Who knows? But on balance, I would say the blackmail helps. It always helps.’
‘I might not fully understand the hollow replica of the Kingdom of Jackals you’ve got turning on the transaction-engine drums of your little metropolis in the clouds,’ said Oliver, ‘but I know the basics well enough to recognize that such a model only functions when all the variables are known. How broken is that thing right now?’
‘Broken enough for me to let a scrote like you walk around the Court of the Air.’
‘I thought that was what the Court wanted,’ said Oliver. ‘Me up here. Your people have been trying to catch me for years now.’
‘Unknown variables,’ sighed Harry, looking across at where his old friend’s brace of pistols lay concealed within their double shoulder holster. ‘And the Hood-o’the-marsh is one of the biggest of them all.’
‘Your people have been trying to catch the wind with their fingers, Harry. You could toss me into one of your cells right now – you know what would happen next. One day someone in your armoury would open the vault where you’d locked away my guns and they wouldn’t be there. They’d be in the hands of someone else wearing a hood and leading your agents a merry dance across the face of Jackals.’
Harry was about to reply when the door of the lifting room at the end of the corridor slid open, revealing a warder doing his hourly cell check.
The warder looked quizzically at the trolley, the cell number hooked around the front just as regulations required. ‘What’s Timlar Preston doing out of his cell? He’s not due to be put under for a room sweep until the end of the week?’
‘What does it look like?’ said Harry. ‘I’m a wolftaker, he’s a wolf. I’m taking him.’
‘I know who you are, Mister high-and-mighty Wolf Twelve. What I haven’t seen are any release from custody papers for Timlar Preston.’
‘Special orders,’ said Harry. ‘He’s about to get time off for good behaviour.’
‘You’ve got to be having a bloody laugh—’ the guard’s protests were interrupted by a klaxon, an urgent, intense burst of sound from the other end of the prison sphere.
‘Proximity alarm,’ announced Harry for Oliver’s benefit. Not their prison break discovered, then.
‘But we’re well out of season for a skrayper attack,’ noted the warder.
He walked to the other side of the corridor and rotated a handle, lifting a storm shutter off a viewing porthole. Something megalithic, grotesque, was slipping through the clouds, drifting past the aerospheres of the Court’s city in the firmament. Brief gaps in the cloud cover revealed a wall of dark, rust-coloured metal peppered with jagged spikes and lit by savage bursts of red light.
‘What in the name of the Circle is that thing?’ sputtered the warder. ‘It looks like it’s riding a lightning storm!’
‘Not a lightning storm,’ said Oliver, glancing over the guard’s shoulder at the strange craft. ‘It’s riding the leylines.’
Oliver could feel the power of it. A spike of raw energy leeched straight from the heart of Jackals below, lifting this monstrosity up, pushing a devil’s cauldron into heaven’s limits. It was like a bloated flying citadel, a hideous castle ridi
ng on the energy of the leylines.
‘We’re opening our gun ports,’ said the warder, hardly believing what he was seeing. Apart from driving off the skraypers and other gas creatures, the Court’s defences had never been used in anger. From somewhere inside the city a series of small aerostats emerged like angry hornets protecting their nest, then they were past the porthole and there was a thump-thump as they ran into the attacker’s fire. A backblast of burning hull fragments bounced off the viewing glass, spinning ribs of hull skeleton windmilling past.
The warder noticed Harry rushing the handcart down the passage at speed. ‘Hey!’
‘What’s the very best way to start a fight with your enemy?’ asked Harry.
Running behind the cart, Oliver raised up two fingers. The two fingers he could use to push into an opponent’s eyes, blinding them.
‘Glad to see your time with me wasn’t totally wasted.’
They nearly lost their footing as the corridor tilted, the handcart slipping across the floor with the impact of an explosion. Timlar Preston’s restraining straps held him on the flatbed, but Oliver barely managed to escape having his legs crushed by the buggy. There was another explosion inside the Court of the Air. More distant this time, the impact taken by one of the spheres at the far end of the aerial city. The tenor of the klaxons changed, becoming a frantic hoot as Harry redoubled his efforts at dragging the cart forward, Oliver struggling to keep up.
‘Will the lifting room to the hangar still be working?’ Oliver shouted over the racket.
‘Not in a minute’s time,’ called Harry. ‘That’s a separation alert.’
‘Separation from what?’
‘Our transaction-engine chambers have done the maths on trading blows with whatever the jigger that is out there. We’re losing.’ There was a rattle as a porthole next to them was covered with an iron grille sliding down the outside of the prison sphere. ‘The Court of the Air is preparing to separate. Each sphere of the city becomes an independent airship and they scatter.’
Oliver gripped the handcart as the prison sphere began to list in the opposite direction. ‘Scatter to where?’
‘Damned if I know, this is the first time we’ve had to do it since I’ve been with the Court. There’ll be a rendezvous point for anyone who makes it out alive.’
‘Stop!’
Oliver looked around. It was the warder catching up with them.
‘Get him back in his cell.’
‘Why?’ asked Oliver.
The warder stared at Oliver with contempt.
‘He’s just a cadet,’ apologized Harry, abandoning the cart and moving back down the corridor. ‘Wasn’t so long ago that I slipped him out of Bonegate Jail to join us.’
The warder grabbed the handles of the handcart, pushing Oliver to the side. ‘You think we’re going to risk the prison sphere crashing into Jackals with fifty year’s worth of captures? If this mob of rascals got out all at once, Jackals would be an anarchy within a year—’ His words were interrupted by a muffled crash from down the corridor, followed by the pop of explosive compression. ‘We’re flushing out all of the prisoners, high category ones first, and they don’t come much higher than Timlar Preston.’
Harry’s hand slipped over the warder’s mouth from behind, silencing him as he thrust a dagger through the man’s spine. The warder arched violently and then slumped over Preston’s comatose form. ‘That’s why I need him alive, old stick.’
‘You didn’t have to do that,’ said Oliver.
‘You’re a fine one to talk. Of course I bleeding did,’ said Harry. He pushed the corpse off Timlar Preston’s unconscious form. ‘Just like I’m going to have to drag him into an empty cell before it’s flushed. Half measures won’t see our people through today safely.’ He snapped a chain of punch cards off the dead warder’s belt. ‘And he wasn’t going to give us the keys to the guards’ station if we’d just asked him nicely.’
An acrid burning smell reached Oliver’s nose. That wasn’t good. Just how badly had the prison sphere been hit? The rattle of explosions outside grew louder. Harry left Oliver to manhandle the prisoner gimbal forward while he slotted a red punchcard key into the guard station’s lock. Ducking down to check inside before the armoured door had fully withdrawn into the ceiling, Harry waved his old comrade-in-arms forward. ‘Nobody here. They’ll all be up top in the main station, trying to work out which one of them has the most flight time on an aerosphere.’
Oliver had nearly gained the door when a series of detonations thunder-cracked in a timed sequence, then the floor veered off from under them, leaving Oliver holding the gimbal with one hand and the door with the other.
Harry staggered to the guard station’s entrance and reached out to help pull Timlar Preston’s unconscious form inside. ‘Unfortunately, right now, I think that would be me.’
Oliver looked up. Those last explosions had been too measured to be part of the battle. Separation! Through an arc of glass in the guard station their perilous state of affairs stood revealed in its true horror. The Court of the Air had split into a hundred separate globes, many trailing smoke and flames, stabilizer rotors being reorientated into flight position, the rubber gangways and sealed corridors that had connected the aerial city drifting down now through the clouds like streamers at a country fair. Some of the spheres’ gun ports were still firing, a few surviving airships looping through the carnage, razor prows thrumming uselessly with the power electric – their enemy today no pod of skraypers that could easily be repulsed with a few shocks. The vapour cloud cover generated by the city’s vast array of transaction engines had cleared away sufficiently to reveal the passage of the executed prisoners; white trails like spider legs reaching out, thin lines of heated oxygen where the cells’ decompression seals had been explosively blown. Every few seconds there was another pop and a new captive would be launched flailing – quickly stilled – into the airless vaults of the upper atmosphere.
Oliver could no longer see the vast hull of the enemy craft, but he could feel the weight of their evil riding the leylines like a mountain balancing on an eruption of magma. Draining Jackals of her ancient lifeforce as they flew, turning the precious power of the land against those that they would conquer. The attacker’s vessel was filled with soldier slats similar to the beasts he had slain outside Tock House’s walls. He brushed their minds, glimpsing memories of their war craft’s construction. It had been built by stripping the mountains of Catosia, levelling them to make a honeycombed cauldron of black rock, minerals sucked out by slug-like things and excreted as a trail of panels and girders in their wake. Oliver pushed past the slats’ minds, trying to locate their masters’ presence. No, there were only the soldiers of the Army of Shadows inside the citadel. Strange. Oliver recoiled in disgust as he probed their essence. They were foul – it was all he could do to hold back the urge to retch. Greed. Avarice. A stripped-down core of pure selfish loathing for anything outside of the Army of Shadows. Kill. Devour. Breed. All with a fierce, demented energy about them, locking this storm of locusts to their labours with an intensity so driving it burnt Oliver’s soul to behold. It had been an age since the slats had fed properly. So many centuries since they’d had a green, fresh land to strip. There was something else, too. Amusement. Amusement at the clumsy collection of locked airships that had made up the Court of the Air – that something so ephemeral and weak and subtle could count itself the guardian of an entire nation. The slats piloting the flying citadel showed their contempt by drawing up the force of the land and reflecting it towards the toy spheres they faced. Great gobs of power flaring out and lighting the floating city up the way children might burn out a hornet’s nest for the fun of it. Oh, how they loved to see the hornets burn.
Shaken by a massive impact, the prison sphere’s floor dipped out from under Oliver and Harry’s feet, leaving them suspended in the air for a second before spilling them back down to the floor. One of the instrument panels blew behind them; a shower of sparks falling
over Timlar Preston’s body. Harry cursed like a navvy, getting to his feet and struggling to spin a wheel on a hatch in the floor. ‘The lifeboat is a tad cramped, but there’s room for two if you drop down alongside him.’
Oliver looked at Harry.
‘I may be a bastard, but I’m not a coward. This is my battle and I’m not leaving it to a bunch of lousy prison guards on an aerosphere to fight.’
‘The Court’s finished, Harry.’
‘We’re never finished. We might be folding this hand of cards on the table, but the great game never ends.’
Oliver dragged Timlar Preston’s comatose form towards the lifeboat hatch. How many years had the Court hunted Oliver across the face of Jackals? Fearing him. Fearing the brace of pistols that had been handed down from generation to generation of those who had worn the mantle of the Hood-o’the-marsh. The Court. His implacable enemy. More cunning than the crushers from Ham Yard. More persistent than the cavalrymen from the barracks of the New Pattern Army. The Court of the Air had always been there. The unseen eye in the sky. Always watching. Always planning. How would the kingdom see without them? What future could there be without the carefully crafted path the Court was leading them down? Oliver was missing them already. Invisible and invincible no longer – just a collection of mortals tending the civil war’s legacy of democracy, blown to the four winds on a motley squadron of high-altitude aerospheres.
Oliver lowered Preston into the lifeboat, a low moan escaping the scientist’s lips as he banged his spine on the iron sphere’s walls. Preston fell away and Oliver dropped his feet through the hatch. ‘What is the enemy going to do next?’
‘After they’ve blinded the realm by taking us out? Well, if it was me, there’d be a right good kicking coming for any Jackelian that tries to stop them invading.’
A tinny voice broke out from a speaking trumpet mounted on the console. ‘Station twelve! Station twelve, we’ve been boarded. All hands to repel boarders on the lower levels. They’re beasts; they’re—’