The Court of the Air

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘I hate you,’ shouted the prince. ‘And I hate your fairytales. That’s your people out there, and all they want to do is tear you apart.’

  The king had a faraway look in his eyes. ‘Bring me my mask.’

  Flare sighed. ‘Bring the King’s gag. Bonefire, Hardfall, cool the mob’s appetite for blood a little first.’

  Bonefire grinned. ‘Twitching time for the hamblins.’

  Opening the balcony doors, the wind caught the velvet capes of the two Special Guards. Bonefire raised a fist and cerulean false-fire leapt from his arm, lashing out along the perimeter of the palace railings. Unlike some of the other burners in the Special Guard, Bonefire’s ethereal energy did not ignite physical objects, failed to even leave a mark on a victim’s skin; but for anyone caught in the witch-light, they felt as if they were burning alive at the stake, a pain more terrible than plunging a hand into a hearth.

  Flare had fought to have Bonefire brought into the Special Guard. Originally the political police had illegally apprenticed the boy into their coercement and interrogation section, using his unnatural fey fire to loosen reluctant tongues. He still enjoyed his work.

  As the front of the crowd fell back in burning agony, Flare nodded to Hardfall. She moved forward onto the balcony and placed her hands on her head, pressing her skull in her concentration position. Down in the square thousands of protesters began to lift off the ground, boots and shoes thrashing as they paddled desperately against the air. A brief quiet fell as the yells and abuse faded away, a silence broken only by the screams of the protesters still suffering from the after-effects of the guardsman’s false-fire.

  When the mob had been lifted four feet in the air Hardfall gently lowered them back onto the cobbles. As the stunned mob’s feet touched the ground King Julius slowly walked onto the balcony, his royal face-gag strapped on. Some of the protesters – the hardcore Carlists and republicans – ran forward and started throwing fruit and stones up towards the balcony.

  Without arms to steady himself, the King was quickly knocked down in the rain of rubbish and debris from the square. The stoning continued; the dazed monarch fell to his knees then slipped down in a huddle under the hail. But it was half-hearted. Hardfall’s demonstration of the Special Guard’s abilities had broken the spell over the majority of the crowd. They milled around startled, then began to drift off, shaken by their fey protectors’ powers. Eager to withdraw before they were treated to a repeat manifestation.

  The major had to restrain the crown prince from dragging his father off the balcony. Tears were running down his face. ‘They’re killing him, the jiggers. Why do they hate us, why?’

  ‘He’s a symbol,’ said Captain Flare. ‘Just a symbol to them. Nothing more.’

  Bonefire walked back into the throne room smiling. He had enjoyed his afternoon’s workout. ‘Don’t worry, boy. The architects planned the distance of the balcony from the square. Just far enough away to land a few licks without maiming His Highness permanently. You’ll see, you’ll get your turn on the balcony soon enough. Your father won’t die from a few empty jinn bottles tossed in his direction, not today.’

  Alpheus looked with rage at Bonefire. ‘There was a time when the guard protected the King from the enemies of the land, protected the people from mobs and thugs.’

  Captain Flare quietly led the crown prince away from the throne room. ‘I have heard your father’s stories too, Alpheus. Leave him now, I’ll bring him inside in a minute after the mob’s dregs have had their sport.’

  ‘They were more than stories once, captain,’ said Alpheus. ‘But now? We’re just royal geese being made plump for the Midwinter Festival, a morsel to whet the people’s appetite. You can toss the mob my family’s bones to pick their teeth with after they’ve had their fun. My whole life is little more than a fattening cage.’

  Flare tapped the silver suicide torc hexed onto his neck and inclined his head towards the crow-like figures of the ever-present worldsingers. ‘Your ancestors would have been better served by trusting the fey, Your Highness. If the old kings had put their trust in the Special Guard rather than the order, Kirkhill could have been made to stay a loyal servant of the crown, rather than keeping the crown in a box under the speaker’s seat in the House of Guardians.’

  ‘The sorcerers are powerful,’ was all Alpheus could say.

  ‘When they choose to be,’ said Flare. ‘There haven’t been any serious floatquakes in Jackals this year, I grant you. But I did not see a cursewall hexed around the palace just now. A five-flower worldsinger could have dispersed that mob as well as any Special Guardsman. But they never seem to place themselves in physical danger unless they have to, do they? Far easier to stir up prejudice against the feybreed, lock away a few twisted unfortunates and pass themselves off as the protectors of Jackals. A position which pays the order handsomely, I assure you.’

  ‘Sometimes I think about killing myself, captain,’ said Prince Alpheus. ‘Wouldn’t that be a fine thing for the people. I could just step out on that balcony and jump over it in front of them all. That’s about the only freedom I have left. To decide when to die.’

  Flare smiled regretfully. He did not point out how hard it was to commit suicide with no arms on your body, with ranks of worldsingers waiting to paralyse any king or queen who attempted to deprive parliament of its sport.

  ‘Please don’t, Alpheus. We both have our cages and our roles to play. Besides, life has a way of surprising you when you least expect it.’

  ‘You, captain?’

  The Special Guardsman opened the door to the prince’s chamber. ‘Once my life was the quiet of the moors. Leading the sheep out to pasture with each sunrise, the four walls of a flint cottage in Pentshire. That was before the mist came and changed me; the things I have seen with the Special Guard are nothing I could have ever imagined chewing mutton and bread on the hills over Wickmoral.’

  Flare turned to go, but Alpheus reached out and touched his cloak. ‘Captain, please. I think I can bear the stonings, but for Circle’s pity, don’t let them take my arms off.’

  ‘Your Highness, there’s many a slip, between a cup and a lip.’

  Ver’fey had to hold Molly back from assaulting the aerostat navigator in the small basket.

  ‘Mug-hunters, filthy mug-hunters!’

  ‘Molly.’ Ver’fey struggled with her friend. ‘They’re not after the bounty on your head, really they’re not. I wouldn’t have led mug-hunters down here if all they wanted was to top you.’

  ‘Let me introduce myself,’ said the navigator. ‘My name is Silas Nickleby and I am interested in the price that is currently on your head among the flash mob. But not, I would point out, for the purpose of collecting your reward for myself or my employer.’

  Molly stopped struggling. ‘Your employer?’

  ‘Dock Street’s finest, Red,’ said Professor Harsh, watching the fracas with casual amusement. ‘The Middlesteel Illustrated News.’

  ‘You’re a pensman?’ said Molly. Why would anyone want to write about my life?’

  ‘If we hadn’t got to you back there, Molly, your part in my story would have been as the latest in a long line of murders I’ve been following for the last six months. I take it you’ve heard of the Pitt Street slayings?’

  ‘Not many people going up Pitt Hill after dark now,’ said Molly. ‘Of course I’ve heard about the slayer. The papers have been saying it’s some mad Carlist stalker with a grudge against the quality, killing nobs and leaving their bodies in the street with their eyes sliced out.’

  ‘Not just the great and the good,’ said Nickleby. ‘Although it’s mostly the rich that have been the victims of the slayer. And it’s not just their eyes that have been taken, Molly. All of the victims have been drained of their blood. Every last drop.’

  ‘You can’t think that wicked old goat back there was the slayer?’ said Molly. ‘He was an aristo himself.’

  Professor Harsh laughed. ‘The count might slip a knife in your back for
a bag of silver crowns, kid, but he doesn’t work for thrills. Whatever else you can accuse him of, being cheap is not one of them.’

  Nickleby passed the rudder mechanism on the expansion engine to the professor. ‘This is my story, Molly. I was one of the first pensmen on the scene of the original Pit Hill murder and I have been covering each new death since. As I’ve been digging around, I keep on uncovering odd little details, things that point to the murders being more organized than the work of a single lunatic. So I’ve been keeping my eyes open for the esoteric, trying to find a connection between those being murdered.’

  ‘What’s this got to do with me?’ said Molly. ‘I’m not rich. You want to know who set the count on me, you want to look to my family.’

  ‘That’s what Ver’fey first told me when I tracked her down,’ said Nickleby. ‘And in a way, Molly, it’s true – although I don’t think there’s an inheritance involved. Many of the Pitt Hill Slayer’s victims have had red hair and two of the dead were cousins twice removed, which has led me to suspect there might be some family connection involved.’

  ‘It isn’t whole families that have been topped,’ said Molly. ‘It’s just the odd nob here and there.’

  ‘Indeed so,’ said Nickleby. ‘Curious, is it not? Almost as curious as a poorhouse being burned to the ground with a lot of bodies inside that were obviously corpses before the fire even started – and half a mill’s-worth more children missing. Then there’s the workhouse girl with the kind of price on her head that was last seen when King Reuben was hiding in trees from parliament’s men.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Molly, tears misting in her eyes. ‘I never thought I’d say this, but I just want things back the way they were before. I want a nice quiet job in a Handsome Lane laundry, with Circleday off to sit in the people’s library.’

  ‘I can’t give you that, Molly,’ said Nickleby. ‘But you’re under the newspaper’s protection now, and my own. I can give you the best chance you’re going to get to find out who is behind the Pitt Hill murders and uncover the person who wants you dead.’

  The pensman stuck out his hand and Molly briefly hesitated, then shook it.

  Professor Harsh laughed. ‘If anyone from his rag comes to you with a piece of paper to sign, you show it to me first, Red. Otherwise you’re going to end up badly illustrated on the cover of a penny dreadful surrounded by twenty axe-wielding toppers and with ginger hair as long as a Special Guard cloak.’

  Nickleby flexed his arms, a thin imitation of the professor’s gorilla-sized muscles. ‘Queen of the Sands, as deadly as a viper and as quick as the wind.’

  ‘Poor as a church mouse and refused tenure at seven of the eight great universities,’ said Harsh. ‘Not much of a story in that.’

  Molly left her two rescuers to their banter and stood with Ver’fey, watching the landscape slide by. The first airship flight for both of them. Their pocket aerostat drifted through a series of caverns, some of them empty, some of them covered by the ruins of Chimecan cities, ziggurat buildings overgrown by fungal jungles. They floated up natural chimneys and what might have been air-vents hewn out of the rock, each massive opening taking them a little closer to the surface. After an hour of flight, swaying in the gondola to the rhythm of the airship’s single coughing expansion engine, Molly’s nose was assailed by the foulest of smells. They were sailing above a sea of dark sludge, sliding like cold russet lava beneath them.

  ‘Break out the heliograph,’ said Professor Harsh. ‘If our friends don’t receive the code they’re liable to assume the worst.’

  Nickleby levered open a crate and removed a large gas-fed heliograph, firing its lighting mechanism up. Pulling the heliograph’s handle back and forth, the pensman started signalling down the cavern. A minute later a series of answering flashes blinked from the shadows at the far end of the cavern. As they drew closer, Molly could make out the outline of a squat stone fortress built into the face of the cavern wall.

  Nickleby pointed to the huge pipes on either side of the fortress, pumping out the noxious smelling sludge into the underground sea. ‘Fort Downdirt, Molly. The Worshipful Company of Nightsoil Engineers and the last civilized outpost of Jackals down here.’

  If anything the stench became worse as they approached the fortress. As their craft got nearer, Molly noticed large ball-mounted cannons were tracking their progress, hoses connecting the guns to tanks of noxious flammable vapours. There were gas-masked figures mounted on tame pecks patrolling the perimeter, long lances tucked behind their saddles. Squatting on top of the walls, bombards loaded with dirt-gas mortar rounds pointed their ugly frogmouths out towards the sea of sewage.

  ‘Are they expecting trouble?’ Molly asked.

  ‘War on two fronts,’ said Harsh. ‘The outlaws of Grimhope would love to back up the city’s shit, although the last time they managed that was back in King Jude’s reign. Then you’ve got the sewer scavengers and other misfits in the higher under-city and basement levels who seem to regard Middlesteel’s crap like it’s a precious resource that’s being stolen away from them.’

  Their pocket aerostat was drifting towards the stone fortress.

  ‘Don’t know why they should be bothered,’ said Molly. ‘There’s always more shit in Middlesteel.’

  Harsh passed Molly a line with a lead weight on the end. ‘My thoughts precisely. Cast this down when we’re about the same height as the buildings. Try not to brain anyone, kid.’

  As they were hauled down by a team of engineers, Molly saw that the fortress inhabitants’ faces were all concealed by menacing brown gas masks, even the four-armed craynarbians’ – names stencilled above their visors alongside little silver stars of rank. Molly was about to leap from the basket when three engineers with large porcelain tanks of flammable vapours and iron-tipped hoses took position around the aerostat. A fourth engineer on a peck wheeled out a blood machine on a cart. The peck was impatiently scratching the floor, its bird-like feet shorn of all its toe claws.

  Dismounting from the peck, the engineer stared at Molly through the visor of his gas mask. ‘This is the girl you came for?’

  Professor Harsh vaulted the airship gondola. ‘Scrawny little thing, sergeant. No meat on those arms.’

  ‘No gold statues this time, then, professor?’

  ‘If you find a temple in the Duitzilopochtli Deeps that hasn’t been turned over a thousand times by grave robbers, outlaws and scavengers, you be sure and give me first refusal, sergeant.’

  The professor pressed her thumb on the needle of the blood machine and waited for the small steam-driven transaction engine to confirm her identity.

  ‘You match your census record, Amelia,’ said the engineer officer. ‘And you can vouch for your companions?’

  ‘Didn’t leave the aerostat once,’ said the academic. ‘Didn’t even touch soil in the Deeps.’

  Moving past the engineer, Molly dodged under the peck’s vicious beak and looked at the transaction engine on the blood machine. Something about the way its calculation drums were turning whispered to her that it would break down before the end of the month.

  The engineer sergeant switched off the machine’s boiler. ‘There’s fey runners down here, girl. Shape switchers. Outlaw worldsingers who can put the glamour on your face too, mould your skin like putty. You can’t be too careful.’

  Molly gave the engineer her best dumb female smile and when his back was turned, she pushed and clicked the out-of-calibration drum into its offsteam mode. Their maintenance staff would spot the wear on it now, when they came to check the blood machine.

  Ver’fey called out to her and Molly saw that the pensman and the professor were entering the fortress; two lines of thick metal doors opening like interlocking dragon’s teeth. Inside, a private line on the atmospheric lifted them to the surface in a bare service capsule. The capsule was crowded with the Worshipful Company’s engineers, large soldiers with gas masks and unloaded pistols dangling from their belts, the stench of sewer pipes
and peck sweat still clinging to them.

  They emerged at the foot of the North Downs, low chalk hills that bordered the outskirts of Middlesteel and the Crystsoil Palace. Acres of glass domes and greenhouses covered the sewage treatment fields, masking the smell of the city’s swill from the wealthy homes and estates of north Middlesteel; villages until Jackals’ capital had devoured them in its spread outwards from the river.

  Professor Harsh shook Nickleby’s hand; her massive arms making the writer’s seem like sticks in comparison. ‘I need to wait for them to crate up the stat and send it topside. I trust that The Illustrated is good for the finder’s fee we agreed?’

  ‘They’re paying me, aren’t they?’ said Nickleby. ‘You are still searching for the city then?’

  ‘Going to head out to the mountains in Airney,’ said the professor. ‘There’s a lashlite nest there where I heard the flying lizards have an old legend of a hunting party finding something in the sky. I need to look into it.’

  ‘The university won’t be pleased if they find out.’

  ‘That’s why it’s your money paying for the trip,’ said Harsh. She ruffled Molly’s hair and slapped Ver’fey’s sword arm. ‘It’s not too late to accept my offer, Ver’fey.’

  ‘I like the feel of Middlesteel’s cobbles under my feet too much to join your expedition, damson,’ said Ver’fey. ‘Besides, Mister Nickleby has already secured me a position on his newspaper.’

  ‘Copy runner?’ said Harsh. ‘Kid, that’s more dangerous than life with me. You’ll have runners from the Star, Journal and Post waiting on every corner from Dock Street to your print works to slap you down.’

  Ver’fey tapped her shell armour with her sword arm. ‘There isn’t anyone who knows the lanes and passages like a Sun Gate girl.’

  Molly nodded in agreement.

  ‘You change your mind about life in the smoke,’ said the professor, ‘you can find me through Saint Vine’s College.’