The Court of the Air

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘It’s as hard to lose a brother as a father, old stick,’ said Harry, gently. Seeing the effect the conversation was having on Oliver, he stopped. ‘Let’s not talk of it either, then. We’ll allow those who have moved along the Circle to rest in their new lives.’

  Oliver wondered if his uncle’s visitor knew he was registered. Probably. If he had known his parents, he would have heard the stories of what had happened to them. And to Oliver. If it bothered Harry, he did not show it.

  They were in town now. Seventy Star Hall lay beyond Hundred Locks proper, nestled at the foot of the hills that led up to the Toby Fall Rise. A dog tied to a post outside the fish market was barking as dockers down from Shipman Town arrived to find evening lodgings at the inns and drinking houses, their heavy steel-capped boots clattering against the cobblestones.

  The talk of his parents had lowered Oliver’s mood. So this was to be the map of his life, then. Allowed no proper trade or apprenticeship. Signing onto the county registration book once a week. Shunned by most of the townspeople. Running small errands for his uncle to keep him busy and out from under his relative’s feet. Unable to leave the parish boundaries without being declared rogue and hunted down. Denied those simple freedoms that even the fox in the burrow or the swallow in the tree took for granted. An object of pity, perhaps; charity, on his uncle’s part; aversion from those who were once his friends and fellows.

  With those bleak reflections they reached Seventy Star Hall to be met on the doorstep by the maid of all works, Damson Griggs. She took in Harry Stave – his battered travel case and cheap clothes – and wrinkled her nose in disapproval, as if Oliver were a cat returning with a dead mouse for her pantry.

  Damson Griggs was a fierce old bird, and whether it was the prospect of working with the damson, or being in the same house as a registered boy such as Oliver, she was now the only full-time member of housekeeping staff at Seventy Star Hall. Any other house of similar size in Hundred Locks would have at least five or six staff keeping the place. But Titus Brooks was something of a lonely, anti-social figure, so perhaps it suited him to keep the arrangement that way. Damson Griggs regarded the town’s superstitious fear of Oliver as stuff and nonsense. She had known the boy since a pup, and if there was an ounce of feymist in him, it had not manifested itself in front of her these last eleven years.

  Oliver might have been of the same opinion himself, but then he had never told his uncle or their housekeeper about his cold, dark dreams.

  ‘What wicked wind has blown you to our doorstep, Harold Stave?’ asked the damson.

  ‘Harry, please, Damson Griggs,’ said their visitor.

  ‘Well then, I suppose I had better be about locking up the master’s brandy cabinet if you are to be staying with us. Unless you have finished with your dirty boozing and lusting across the length and breadth of Jackals – and a good many other nations besides, I don’t wonder.’

  ‘Now who’s been impugning my reputation in such a manner?’ asked Harry, scratching at his blond mop of hair. ‘There’s not a drop of the old falling-down water passed my lips these two weeks, Damson Griggs.’

  ‘Your manners were too coarse for the navy to keep you.’ Damson Griggs wagged a sausage-sized finger at the man. ‘And they’ll keep you no better under this roof either.’

  Despite her admonishments, she opened the door wider for Harry to enter, taking his thin summer travel cloak and hanging it on one of the bullhorn-shaped hooks in the hallway. Wide and white-tiled, the hallway was still filled with bright clean light. By late afternoon the sun would be behind Toby Fall Rise and the north end of Hundred Locks would live up to its name – Shadowside – as the shade from the dike fell across their house. Then the damson would bustle around, lighting the oil lamps filled with fatty blood from the massive slip-sharps netted in the Sepia Sea and slaughtered above them in Shipman Town.

  ‘Thank you kindly, damson,’ said Harry. He winked at Oliver.

  A noise came from upstairs. Titus Brooks was still in his study, an onion-shaped dome in which the previous occupant – a retired naval officer – had installed a telescope. Now only the brass mountings remained in the centre of the room, the telescope itself having been removed when he died and sold off by his sons and daughters.

  Damson Griggs disappeared with the guest, coming back down the staircase alone. ‘You pay heed to my words, Oliver Brooks. Stay away from that man. He’s a bad sort.’

  ‘Is he a sailor, Damson Griggs?’ Oliver asked.

  ‘The only airship he flies in is the Lady Trouble,’ spat the housekeeper.

  ‘He was a sailor, though? You said…’

  ‘You just mind what I have to say now, young Master Brooks. The only action that jack ever saw was the watering down of an honest sailor’s rum ration. Harry Stave used to work for the Navy Victualling Board before you were even born, buying in victuals, celgas and other supplies for the RAN. He knows your uncle from his contracts with the Board. But Mister Stave was discharged. Caught with his hand deep in the till, no doubt.’

  ‘And he works for Uncle Titus now?’

  ‘No, young master. He most certainly does not. He works for himself, just as much as he always did.’

  ‘So what trade does he keep that would bring him here?’

  ‘A good question indeed. And if you ask him direct I doubt you’ll get an honest answer. Some old toot about buying cheap and selling for a little more is as like what you would hear.’

  Oliver stared up the stairs towards his uncle’s study.

  ‘No, young Master Brooks, you had better give that man a wide berth. Your neck is too valuable to me to see it ending up dancing for the hangman’s crowds outside the walls of Bonegate. And if you keep company with that rascal for too long, you’ll be heading down the path of criminality, of that I am certain.’

  There was no tweaking Damson Griggs’s nose when she took against someone, so Oliver just nodded in agreement. From where he was standing, the path of criminality had more to recommend it than an errand boy’s apprenticeship granted out of pity and familial kinship for a dead brother.

  ‘Out from under my feet now with your questions, young Master Brooks,’ commanded the damson. ‘Millwards delivered our pantry stock this morning and I have a pie to bake for supper. An extra large one, if that rascal upstairs with your uncle intends to stay the night.’

  Returning to Seventy Star Hall from the crystalgrid oper ators’ at twilight’s last gleaming with a leather satchel full of Middlesteel punch-card messages for his uncle – prices from the financial houses of Gate Street and stock movements from the exchange at Sun Lane – Oliver was worn out from walking.

  Damson Griggs had returned to her cottage in town, leaving his pie and cold boiled potatoes covered by a plate in the kitchen. From the two empty wineglasses, red with the dregs of a bottle of claret, Oliver guessed that his uncle and their guest had eaten already. He walked to the top of the staircase and saw that a light was still showing under the door of his uncle’s study, the muffled sound of conversation inside.

  Damson Griggs’s words of warning came to his mind. Why was this interloper of uncertain provenance visiting his uncle? Was Uncle Titus stooping to involve himself in some scheme of a dubious nature? Oliver was not a financier from some fancy address in the capital’s Sun Gate district, but his uncle’s business affairs seemed sound enough from his limited vantage point.

  Oliver crept back down to the ground floor and lifted a key from under the stairs, then quietly unlocked the door to the drawing room. Inside, the fireplace’s flue ran upwards through to the study, opening into a grill above, the only source of warmth for the study during the cold winter nights at Hundred Locks. As Oliver had discovered, where heat carries upward, the sounds of conversation echo downward. Oliver placed his ear to the opening. Outside, the first evening stars were appearing. Before midnight, all seventy stars the grey limestone house was named after would be visible. His uncle and his guest’s voices were not raised and Oliver
had to strain to catch snippets of the conversation.

  ‘Trouble – counting on a commo plan – compromised—’ His uncle.

  ‘If it is – think they – hostile service – learn—’ The dis reputable Stave.

  ‘This time – up to – in the black—’

  Oliver leant forward as much as he dared. There was a familiar tapping. His uncle clearing his mumbleweed pipe on the side of his desk.

  ‘Will they be coming—’ Harry Stave.

  ‘Our friends in the east?’ Uncle Titus.

  The East? Oliver’s eyes widened. The Holy Empire of Kikkosico lay northeast. And directly east lay Quatérshift – but no friends there. Not since the Two-Year War.

  In defeat, the Commonshare of Quatérshift had completely sealed its land border, hexing up a cursewall between the two nations; to deter any of her own compatriots who developed a yearning to leave Quatérshift’s revolution-racked land, as well as putting off military incursions by the Jackelians. There was no official trade with the shifties, although smugglers still landed cargoes of brandy along the coast, where moonrakers could evade the attentions of officers from the customs house. Like all the children in Hundred Locks, Oliver had been severely warned never to stray into the hinterlands east of the town, where only the shadows of patrolling aerostats and the odd garrison of redcoats and border foot lay dotted across the wind-blighted moors.

  ‘A dirty game—’ Harry Stave.

  ‘Already – in the wind—’ Uncle Titus. There was a rasp as a chair was pulled back. ‘Two of my people dead—’

  Dead! Oliver caught his breath. What foul business had Harry Stave involved his uncle in? Was their warehouse in Shipman Town concealing casks of untaxed brandy? Had officers from the customs house been murdered on some small rocky harbour in the mountains above?

  A sudden realization struck Oliver. His uncle had never revealed the full extent of his business dealings to him. Oliver ran errands and gleaned what he could, learning piecemeal from the occasional tale of which factor could be trusted to deal fairly, which clipper captain might be tempted to skim a cargo. Only his uncle was at the centre – none of his staff. Even Oliver could see the interests of those in the warehouse never stretched – or were allowed to stretch – further than Shipman Town’s wharves. Was this more than a cautious nature? Or did the left hand’s ignorance of the right hand’s dealings stem from the need to keep Uncle Titus from dangling on the wrong end of a hangman’s rope outside Bonegate gaol?

  There was more scraping of chairs from upstairs and Oliver silently slid the drawing room door shut, then climbed into his bed on the ground floor. Damson Griggs had the measure of Harry Stave, it seemed. But just how deep did his uncle’s involvement go? Oliver felt the sting of shame as his immediate reaction to the thought of his uncle being thrown into prison was not concern for his sole surviving relative, but worry for his own fate. His uncle had already risked exile from what passed for polite society at Hundred Locks for keeping a registered boy under his roof, but no, the unworthy Oliver Brooks was more concerned about what might happen to his own neck.

  If Uncle Titus were incarcerated, he would be left with no chance of employment at Hundred Locks, no future save the cold unwelcoming gates of the local Poor Board. He shivered at the thought. The county of Lightshire’s poor and down on their luck had enough problems of their own; a registered boy being thrown into their midst might be the final straw. How much easier to arrange a small accident at night? A pillow slipped over his face and the unwelcome interloper smothered out of the poorhouse inhabitants’ lives.

  His grey future, ensnared between the invisible walls of his prison-in-exile at Hundred Locks, was growing smaller and smaller as he drifted off into an uneasy sleep.

  Chapter Three

  Surveillant Forty-six nudged the telescope a touch to the left with the foot pedal. It took a couple of seconds for the transaction engine to balance the array of mirrors, the image in the rubber face-glove losing focus before returning to sharpness with a clack – clack – clack. From the corner of his eye, Surveillant Forty-six could see the other surveillants riding the cantilevered brass tubes, cushioned red seats attached underneath the large cannon shapes of the telescopes.

  The scopes followed the arc of the monitorarium, curving around the inside wall of the sphere. A gantry and rail ran behind their telescopes, monitors in grey court-issue greatcoats treading the iron plates. You could almost see the chill in the monitorarium – no heat that might interfere with the operation of the viewings.

  ‘Your report please.’ It was Monitor Eighty-one. She was always brusque and efficient. The wires in his earphones looped back to the gantry, to a voice trumpet where Eighty-one was bending down to speak.

  The monitor was one of the new batch, fresh out of training, one of the ones who thought that relaying reports through, was the same as reporting to. He harrumphed. She lacked even the slight worldsinger craft the surveillants practised. Kicking her feet along the gantry in her fur-lined boots to prevent frostbite, unable to heat her body with her mind. Wearing one of the surveillant’s own leather skins would see her frozen to death in a telescope sling before the end of her first watch. Unable even to modify her blood after sampling one of the many potions the surveillants took to stay awake and focused, weeks at a shift.

  ‘This unit is still pulling slightly to the left,’ complained Surveillant Forty-six. ‘I thought a mechomancer had taken the telescope up to the maintenance level.’

  ‘Stop your whining,’ hissed the monitor. ‘This is a priority observation – someone could be listening. It might be for the old lady herself. You lose the plot on this job and there’ll be bloody analysts crawling all over us. Just give me your report.’

  The surveillant held his tongue. Priority it may be, but not high enough to get his scope pulled out of the monitorarium and into the maintenance schedule, it seemed. ‘Target’s aerostat arrived at the Hundred Locks field as scheduled. Target was escorted to the contact’s house, as anticipated. Target has remained there for the last seven hours. Do you have any analyst predictions or instructions?’

  ‘There is an eighty-seven per cent chance the target will remain in the house for the next sixteen hours. Maintain surveillance.’

  The surveillant sighed. ‘Preparing for night-time sighting.’ He pulled a drinking tube from the telescope, supping at the orange gloop that dribbled out. The potion warmed his skull as sparks fireworked across his eyes; the brew’s night vision would last until sunrise. As the liquid coursed through his body, he reached inside himself with one of the worldsinger magics, rendering the potion inert before it struck his liver, where the strange brew would have ruptured that organ into a broiled stew.

  He gazed back into the rubber mask and centred the view on the smokeless chimney of Seventy Star Hall. True to form, the scope slid to the left. He cursed the bureaucrats of the Court. Silently.

  Chapter Four

  It was hard to predict when the Whisperer would come to Oliver in his dreams. Sometimes he could go for weeks without a visitation – other times the Whisperer might come four nights in a row.

  Oliver was in a large palace somewhere, his uncle, Damson Griggs and others running through the corridors, trying to find a missing chair. The chair was important, obviously. Oliver knew it was a dream because he had never met the King, and the not-so-merry monarch said if they could only find the chair, parliament might agree to sow his arms back on. Then the Whisperer pushed through into the dream.

  ‘Oliver, I can see you. Can you see me?’

  ‘I can’t see you, Whisperer, go away.’

  ‘Then you can, Oliver,’ hissed the misshapen form that had appeared before him. ‘I can connect with you. I can connect with almost all of our kind.’

  ‘I’m not like you, Whisperer,’ said Oliver.

  ‘No. I realize that, Oliver. You are the best of us. I have waited a lifetime or more for you to arrive. The others think they’re perfect, the ones who aren’
t locked up in here with my friends and me. But they haven’t met you, Oliver. If they had they wouldn’t be so proud, so vain, so content with themselves and their powers.’

  Oliver knew they kept the Whisperer locked somewhere dark, deep beneath the earth. Chained in by hexes and curse-walls and powerful worldsinger gates. His ugly lumpen face was beyond description, a wreckage of human flesh. When the Whisperer had been born, his terrified parents must have run a league in the opposite direction.

  ‘Can’t you get out of my mind?’ pleaded Oliver. ‘Get out of my life?’

  ‘You are my life, Oliver,’ hissed the creature. ‘You and the others I contact. Do you think my own life is worth the living? They keep me in the dark, Oliver, alone in a cell hardly tall enough to stand up in so I can’t rush the warders when they remember to check I’m still here. The rats visit me, Oliver. Drawn by my smell and waste. I break my teeth on their bones, sometimes, when the warders forget to feed me.’

  Oliver felt sick. ‘And what do they taste like?’

  The Whisperer laughed, a sound like air escaping from an expansion engine. ‘What do they taste like, Oliver? Like chicken, Oliver, like the finest roast chicken. I borrowed the taste from your mind. I hope you don’t mind. I have so few reference points.’

  Oliver gagged and the Whisperer danced a mad little jig in front of him. ‘I try not to eat the food they give me, Oliver. They put potions in it, to soften my brain and keep me tired, sleepy.’

  In the dream palace the King had appeared again, but he took one look at the Whisperer and turned smartly around.

  ‘How sad, Oliver. Even the phantoms in a dream find me repulsive. Remind me. This time, is it me dreaming of you, or is it you dreaming of me?’

  ‘What does it matter?’ Oliver shouted. ‘Leave my mind alone.’

  ‘Your time is coming, my perfect friend,’ said the Whisperer. ‘You are about to find out what a flexible and surprising thing life is. And when you do, you might be very glad of me crawling around in your skull. Yes, you might be very glad indeed.’