by Stephen Hunt
‘The priests have gone away,’ said Cornelius, ‘along with your other friends.’ He lifted the precious sapling and shielded it inside his greatcoat. The boy stared out across the empty fields, not noticing that his visitor was stumbling west now, away from the farm. Away from Quatershift.
‘I like farming,’ the boy said to himself. ‘Better than dirty loom work, losing my fingers one by one.’
Howling like a dying fox, Cornelius glanced up at the sky as he lurched across the dead ground, the summer sun beating down. He should only look at the sky now, so clear and pure and unsullied. Filled with the sun. Waiting to be devoured. Don’t look at the mud, don’t see the ground bones lying between the furrows. White, angular bones. He lifted the sapling he had dug out high to the heavens, the young trunk left moist and supple by the fertilizer of his murdered wife’s flesh. His tree, his darling tree. She would grow again, but not in the spoiled soil of Quatershift.
He shook the young tree at the sky. ‘This is my wife, this is the child that was in her belly.’
A shadow grew in the sky, dark, bloated, born in the sun and feeding on its warmth. ‘She will live again. Your unbornchild too. They will live in the torment of those that murderedthem.’
‘I’ll give you blood,’ he screamed. ‘Is this what you want? There’s an ocean of it inside the bastards who did this — a whole jigging revolution’s worth of blood.’
See the sky.
‘Yes.’
See the sun.
‘I shall show you my face.’
Sun.
‘My true face.’
Sun Eater.
Master king of demons. With a smirking mouth concealing a furnace and the rotting heart of the devil. Licking at the splintered bones in the fields. Smacking his lips as the juice of mangled souls ran down his burning throat. Furnace-breath Nick.
The light grew brighter, blinding him, consuming the sun.
Cornelius sat bolt upright in bed, panting, the light fading away to become the shine of an oil lantern swinging in Septimoth’s hand. In his other he held a squirming lad, dangling upside down with one of his boots clutched tightly by the lashlite’s talons.
‘I’ve told you before about going out fishing along the river late at night,’ said Cornelius.
‘This fish flopped onto our island all by itself,’ said Septimoth. ‘I heard him trying to force the lock to the east wing.’
‘I wasn’t trying to break into your house, mister,’ said the boy. ‘My name’s Smike, I’ve been sent here with a message for you. What sort of bleeding nob are you anyway, employing the likes of some wild bloody lashlite to guard your place? There should be a law against it.’
‘Knowing the House of Guardians, there probably is.’ Cornelius looked at the lad; it was giving him a crink in his neck trying to talk to him upside down. He motioned to Septimoth and the lashlite flipped him around and put him back on his feet. Smike stood there shakily for a second, dripping water onto the floorboards. Cornelius waited until his silence had made the boy suitably nervous. ‘You swam across?’
‘You think there’s a boat that would risk their river authority licence by dropping the likes of me onto your pier at this time of the night?’
‘You mentioned a message,’ said Cornelius. ‘You must forgive my look of disbelief, because to the best of my knowledge, the only people who know that anyone other than a wealthy, reclusive hermit is living at this address are already inside this house’s walls. And I’m afraid that doesn’t include you.’
‘Well now, how I got to be here is a right old tale for the telling,’ explained Smike. ‘I didn’t catch a name, but the bloke who paid me was an old goat, robed like a Circlist monk. Going around pretending he was blind, but he wasn’t, he could see well enough for me and him both.’
‘A blind monk? That doesn’t sound like anyone I know,’ said Cornelius. ‘Go on …’
‘This old goat was worried about a run of Steamman grave robbing that’s been going on in Middlesteel, organized by the flash mob. Not the new ones just down from the Free State, mind — but old models, the older the better. I saw a little of it going on myself, the Catgibbon’s blades doing the dirty with the shovel work.’
‘Is that all?’ asked Cornelius. ‘There’s always some mechomancer trying to get hold of body parts from the Steamman Free Steam, trying to lift up their own craft by prying out the secrets of how King Steam puts his people together. Grave robbing’s a crime for the crushers to solve, it gives the detectives from Ham Yard something to do.’
‘Now if that isn’t what advice I gave to this old bloke,’ said Smike. ‘He told me your reply would be along the lines of what you just said, too. But he paid me to tell you that one of the mechomancers who was after steammen parts was an old friend of yours from Quatershift, one who, quote, “you would have been far better off leaving behind in a Commonshare prison camp”. Does that make any sense to you, mister?’
Cornelius pushed himself off the four-poster bed. ‘When was this?’
‘About a week ago. I would have come sooner, but the crushers took me in to discuss a small matter of some pocket-books going missing in the lanes of Rottonbow. They got the wrong’un, of course.’
‘A week …’
That was hardly a day after he had gone over the curse-wall into Quatershift to get Robur out. No one knew the timing of his incursions except himself and Septimoth. ‘Did your friend say anything else?’
‘Just that you would know what to do next,’ said Smike.
‘He was wrong about that,’ said Cornelius, ‘I’m damned if I know what to do next. How much did this man give you to memorize the message?’
‘Five sovereigns,’ lied Smike.
Cornelius’s eyes twinkled in amusement. ‘Sink me, but you’re slightly more expensive than the penny post.’ He walked to a drawer and slipped five coins out, passing them to the lad. ‘That’s to forget the message, and to forget the address of my house.’
‘Address?’ said Smike, pocketing the coins. ‘We’re in the upland glens, aren’t we?’
‘Just opposite the southern frontier, I’d say,’ said Cornelius. He glanced at Septimoth. ‘Ask the damson to take our young friend to the pier and hail him a boat. Do get her to check his pockets before he departs, though.’
‘You’re a right gent,’ said Smike.
Cornelius looked out over the distant skyline resting beyond the river: the crumbling rookeries; the more modern pneumatic towers swaying slightly in the fog; the dark silhouette of an aerostat of the merchant fleet drifting across the half moon.
Septimoth returned, no doubt having been given a roasting for waking up their housekeeper at such an ungodly hour. ‘You were wrong when you said that the only people who know that we are living at this address are inside our walls.’ The lashlite pointed up towards the ceiling.
‘I have an understanding with the Court of the Air,’ said Cornelius. ‘I don’t bother them and they don’t bother me. They think it’s rather amusing, the jig we lead the First Committee over in Quatershift. It suits their purposes. But their tolerance only stretches so far. If we start lifting the flash mob’s bludgers from Middlesteel, it won’t take the capital’s pensmen long before ballads and penny dreadfuls begin to appear on the stationer’s carts with Furnace-breath Nick’s face painted on the cover. We need a safe base of operations on this side of the border to strike at the Commonshare. Life on the run will hamper our activities.’
Septimoth considered his friend’s words. With their powerful wings, his race were the only people apart from the Court of the Air’s own agents to have seen the connected aerospheres of the great aerial city, floating far beyond the reach of normal airships. The wisdom of lashlite sages’ recalled a time when the watchers in the sky had not dwelled far above the land. For the people of Jackals below, the secret organization Isambard Kirkhill had built to safeguard parliament’s victory in the civil war was a matter of conjecture, their agents, the wolftakers, a mere whisper
in the jinn houses. Only by their wake could you know the Court of the Air. Missing rebels, the door left ajar on the oddly empty apartment of a crooked politician, science pirates who would simply disappear on the eve of a long-planned victory. Like the great sages of the people of the wind, the Court also attempted to peer ahead into the future. Not with any prophetic third eye, but with their mighty transaction engines, the steam from their endeavours forming a perpetual cloaking cloud around the city in the air. In that steam lay the future, it was said. Cornelius was quite right, of course. Neither of them could afford to become a rogue element in the Court’s calculations of their perfect democracy, an element that would require eliminating.
‘You already have a ballad on the stationer’s carts,’ said Septimoth. ‘You must have heard it? They seek him here, they seek him there, the furnace-breath killer with the demon stare.’
‘We hunt monsters.’
‘Are we now to hunt them closer to home, Cornelius Fortune?’
‘Take on the Catgibbon and the flash mob? Sweet bloody Circle,’ said Cornelius.
‘The monk appears dangerously well informed about our real purpose here and our activities,’ said Septimoth. ‘Even if his warning about rescuing Robur from the Commonshare finds us a little late.’
‘Quite. But rotting steammen being turned out of their graves?’ Cornelius scratched his unshaven cheeks. ‘What do we know about the people of the metal? None of them stayed long in Quatershift after the revolution, not after the Commonshare was declared. The Sun King used to treat the Steamman Free State as if it was just another of his dominions, and the Commonshare’s First Committee act little differently now. The shifties have started more wars with the steammen than they’ve ever fought with Jackals, but why would their agents want to sponsor a spate of steammen grave-robbing?’
Cornelius sighed. He might have a scant understanding of the people of the metal, but he knew someone who did: at the Old Mechomancery Shop along Knocking Yard.
‘I shall ponder the matter in my eyrie,’ said Septimoth. ‘You had your dream again, didn’t you?’
Cornelius said nothing.
‘You should try and dream less,’ advised Septimoth, leaving and closing the door.
‘Yes, I should.’
Cornelius got back into bed and tried to nod off to sleep again, a near impossible task. This was all wrong. Grave robbing, the game of mirrors that had been played on him across the border in Quatershift to free Robur, a monk who knew all about his secret life as the scourge of the shifties. It was all wrong. Were the monsters coming to Middlesteel again?
Veryann’s fighters had taken up positions on the dock, sheltering from the storm of darts being launched from the wild craynarbians’ spring-guns. They returned fire in a smooth rattle; slipping crystal charges into their rifles, ejecting broken glass around the pier, burning blow-barrel hissing as it struck the planking. Above them, a short-nosed cannon had been pushed up to the fortifications of Rapalaw Junction, geysers of water erupting around the tribe’s war rafts as the trading post’s defenders tried to deny the tribesmen a firm foothold below the town’s walls.
Amelia kept her spine pressed up against a low adobe wall, the thud of darts on the other side dissuading her from doing more than snapping off the occasional shot at the lead boats with her pistol. One of the sailors broke cover and tried to run across the boarding ramp to the Sprite, two darts spearing him in his chest and hammering him down into the water. There was a thrashing in the river as something small and hungry finished off the howling submariner in a froth of bubbles.
‘Stay low,’ shouted Bull Kammerlan. He pulled the ejector rod on his carbine and a shower of broken crystal sprayed back as the clockwork mechanism forced the expended charge out. ‘We need more covering fire from the walls before we can run for the boat.’
‘Their rafts are going to be landing along the town’s front within a couple of minutes,’ said Amelia. ‘Best we were gone from here before then.’
‘Really? There’s me thinking that the boys and me would be doing a bit of fishing along here later,’ said Bull. ‘You write a paper on it, dimples; leave the killing to the men.’
A ricocheting arrow interrupted Bull’s stream of sarcasm — it glanced off Ironflanks, the steamman wandering out from the town’s closing gates as carefree as if he were taking a stroll along Goldhair Park back in Jackals. Dart heads bounced off his iron body, one piercing his wide-rimmed hunter’s hat. The steamman went up to the corpse of a fallen uplander in front of their adobe barricade and began tugging the soldier’s long leather army boots off, a task made more difficult by the amount of blood soaking the pin-cushioned uniform.
He looked down at Amelia, crouching on the other side of the wall. ‘Waste not, eh? Fine pair of boots, as fine a pair as I’ve ever seen.’ He slid out a machete and began to hack the corpse’s ankles away.
‘Ironflanks!’
‘Nothing to worry about,’ said Ironflanks, mistaking the professor’s disgust for concern about their predicament. He vaulted to their side of the wall. ‘These mammal-shells attack every other season. They get their fever up listening to their gods’ calls for sacrifices, get tired of eating their own braves out in the jungle. They’re inconveniently early this year, I must say.’
Down the shoreline, the first rafts began to thump against the line of piers, craynarbian warriors that must have been twice the size of the largest of the defenders leaping out — some with grappling claws to scale the walls, others with heavy sacks connected to vine-woven ropes. These they whirled around their heads, releasing them up towards the battlements. As each vine snapped taut, it unplugged a valve in the attached bag — two chambers of blow-barrel sap mixing and exploding against Rapalaw’s walls in a shower of clay fragments. ‘To the u-boat,’ shouted Ironflanks, tucking the bloody boots under his belt. ‘I’m going to get my steam on.’
Amelia cracked a pistol shot off, ducking as a wave of darts answered back. ‘It’s suicide. There’s too much fire coming across the Sprite’s hull.’
Bull Kammerlan pointed up towards the battlements, where squat, toad-like mortars were being pushed forward. ‘Dirtgas, dimples. Once the feral shells hold this side of the shore, our garrison will soak the whole river in dirt-gas. Unless you’ve got a mask hidden underneath that blouse of yours, you’re going to want to be breathing the wind from the commodore’s arse inside the Sprite. It’ll be a damn sight better than the air out here.’
On the exposed ground between the sailors and the Catosian fighters’ position, Ironflanks danced a jig, his twin stacks glowing white-hot as he fed power to his ancient boiler. ‘Now I’m sizzling, now I’m burning!’
Two craynarbians leapt from the prow of their canoe, Ironflanks meeting them in a fiery arc as he vaulted over the makeshift barricade protecting the expedition. Each of his four arms had produced a weapon, machetes and long knives blurring as he cut off the nearest of the warrior’s heads, blocking a bony sword-arm and smashing down on the remaining fighter’s knee joint with a cudgel. Both craynarbians were falling while the steamman sheathed two machetes, unslinging his thunder-lizard gun from his shoulder and jetting the canoe with its charge. Even in the steamman’s manipulator hands the rifle bounced, the recoil sending Ironflanks back by a couple of steps. He had loaded a tree shredder — a jungle special — half a pound of shot humming down the length of the war crew like a nest of hornets. Screaming craynarbians fell into the water, their armour shells ruptured and torn by hundreds of lead balls.
Amelia had seen steammen knights fight before — awesome, powerful, a force of nature — but this was different. Even in their battle rage King Steam’s knights retained a vestige of control; they fought like a focused storm of tonne-weight steel. But Ironflanks seemed to relish the danger as if he were a savage, bounding onto the raft with his rifle shouldered and his blades drawn, sadistically crushing falling braves under his metal feet, the craynarbians’ blood splattering his safari suit as he laughed and dan
ced and hacked his way through the ranks of struggling attackers.
‘Now I’m burning,’ called the steamman, his voicebox on full and a whistle on his back lifting in a victory scream, superheated air spearing upwards. ‘I’m on fire.’
One of the surviving craynarbians, his breast-shell half-torn to pieces, tried to jump on top of Ironflanks’ back, clutching onto the steamman’s belt and the bloody boots he had looted. But Ironflanks twisted the craynarbian off, throwing him to the floor of the raft and burying the tip of his long knife in the creature’s forehead. ‘They’re my boots, wild shell, mine! Patent leather is no good for your claws.’
War chants sounded from the armada of rafts in the river. One of the craynarbian witch doctors, identifiable by his fur-covered antlers, was calling on the worldsong, twisting the power of the rainforest-covered land to the tribe’s own end. In front of their boats the fast-flowing waters began to froth and bubble. Shouts from up in the battlements of Rapalaw Junction urged the dispatch of more gas shells from the garrison’s arsenal.
‘That’s not good,’ said one of the Catosian fighters.
The storm of darts from the tribe’s spring-guns had momentarily abated and Bull leapt up. ‘The Sprite, boys, to the Sprite.’
‘Not with her!’ A sailor pointed at Amelia. ‘Not with the Jonah!’
‘Oh, for Circle’s sake.’ Amelia took the initiative, pushed up and began to run towards the u-boat.
Out on the river Ironflanks twirled around in an obscene mockery of the craynarbian sorcerer’s spell calling, almost perfect imitations of the jungle’s animal-song echoing from his voicebox — tree monkeys, paradise wings, redcats, hunting spiders. Across the wide, deep river birds exploded into the sky and the creatures of the canopy howled and hooted back. Spooked into action by the flare-up of life in the jungle, the submariners broke for the Sprite’s boarding gantry as a panicked mob. In contrast, the Catosian mercenaries fell back in two disciplined lines, one rank kneeling and firing, then stepping back through their comrades, smoothly reloading their carbines as the second rank poured fire back down the shoreline.