The Court of the Air

by Stephen Hunt

  Oliver tried to scramble out from under the beast as its wounds momentarily distracted it, but it was too quick, the buckshot a mere inconvenience. Reaching out it cuffed Oliver in the back and sent him sprawling, then lunged forward, snarling. It sounded like it was talking, idiot words mangled by a lolling tongue and razor teeth. ‘Eta flug, eta flug.’

  Terrified, Oliver met its gaze – the eyes of a human girl, long lashes and blue irises buried in its skull plate looking back at him – angry, angry inhuman rage. Those beautiful eyes blinked in surprise as the ground beneath them disinte-grated, boy and beast carried into the air as clods of mud rained down onto the earth. Floatquake or some desperate worldsinger magic called by Harry? But Oliver was tumbling off something, a rusting metal shell rising out of the soil, water pouring out of gashes and hollows.

  The startled hunter had rolled off him, leaving Oliver’s left arm a furnace of agony, and leapt into the metal sculpture rising out of the mud. It was a corpse, one of the knights steammen, only one battle arm still intact – a pike arm with a rusted brown blade. Metal and muscle joined in a fusion of combat, the panther-sized hunting beast lashing back and forth with its claws, tearing gashes in the zombie’s already broken hull. For its part, the steamman corpse was twist-pumping its pike arm into the beast’s dense stomach muscles. The only sign of the damage it was doing was the red gore slicking its blade.

  The centaur-like steamman fell forward and scooped up the beast with its skeletal manipulator arms. Another corpse was rising from the ground, two-legged and hump-backed, like a jumping rat but with a long metal beak. Soundlessly the iron knight slammed the hunting beast down onto the second steamman corpse’s beak, impaling the creature. It let out a reverberating howl so loud it seemed to rattle the heart inside Oliver’s chest.

  Hearing more human-sounding cries, Oliver looked around to see the redcoats in the distance retreating, falling back in a disciplined skirmish line, the crackle of their rifles breaking against metal bodies uncovering themselves from the hillside. Harry was pulling himself out from under the corpse of the second beast. A headless barrel-sized steamman had pinned the creature to the ground with its pincer-like tripod of legs and the wolftaker was sliding his hunting knife out from the thing’s skull.

  ‘There’s a caliph across the border,’ coughed Harry, ‘who is going to be mighty jiggered that his prize hunting cats are feeding the worms in Jackals.’

  Behind Oliver the shells of the two steammen who’d saved him were sinking back into the bog, one of the bodies weighted down by a tonne weight of dead meat. ‘The Loas, Harry, they’re riding the corpses.’

  ‘Well, it’d be rude to turn down good advice freely given,’ said Harry, looking at the iron zombies shambling after the company of redcoats. ‘And by the looks of it, possibly quite dangerous to boot. Let’s go and see what King Steam has to say.’

  Harry looked at Oliver’s arm, feeling it with the fingers of both his hands. Oliver yelled as the wolftaker applied pressure to the bleeding muscle. ‘Make a bandage with your spare shirt. I’ll tie a tourniquet above the fang marks. You’re going to need to get that sewn and cleaned neater than I can do it.’

  ‘What about Shadowclock, Harry?’

  ‘Shadowclock will still be there after a visit to His Highness in Mechancia,’ said Harry, testing the dead corpse of the hunting beast with his boot. It remained lifeless. ‘So, who do we know who spends too much time in Cassarabia?’

  ‘The Jackelian ambassador to Bladetenbul?’

  ‘That was a rhetorical question,’ replied Harry. He took out a telescope and extended it in the direction of the retreating redcoats. ‘There’s a white wagon back there, medical corps – plague wagon.’ He grinned. ‘Bloody plague wagon. That’s old, Jamie. Let’s hoof it boy, before my old chum and his tame womb mage throw any more of the caliph’s pets our way.’

  Oliver bent down for his blunderbuss. It was intact except for tooth marks on the butt. They left the bones of the hunting beasts to rot with the wreckage of the steammen and the broken divisions of the Commonshare.

  Shortly after they had stopped for lunch, the boggy ground hardened up, the low rolling hills replaced by foothills, tall alpine woods and the start of a snow-capped mountain range. They must have crossed into the Free State – there were no mountains Oliver knew of this far east into Jackals. Most of the metal race’s villages and cities were up in the crags; this low down the only signs of people were the dried donkey droppings from trading caravans. That and metal rods with long ribbons of a paper-thin cloth fluttering in the breeze, the rainbow colours marking the path deeper into the steammen kingdom.

  Maybe it was the icy mountain winds blowing down through the peaks of the Mechancian Spine, but after another hour of walking, pushing towards the steammen capital, Oliver started to shiver. At first it was just a chill and he buttoned up the collar on his coat, but it spread, fingers of cold creeping down across his back. Harry noticed Oliver was falling behind and waited for him to catch up.

  ‘It’s like winter here in the mountains, Harry.’

  ‘Winter? You’re sweating, Oliver. Let me see your arm.’

  Oliver was trembling uncontrollably now. It felt as if just the breeze from the heights was enough to waft him up the slopes, carry him like a leaf spinning into the realm of the steammen. ‘I can’t raise it, Harry. The bandage has made it heavy, like a block of ice. But it tingles below the shoulder.’

  Harry said something, but his voice had faded, then the wolftaker grew very tall – or was it that he was standing over Oliver now? The ground felt firm, almost warm, just the right shape for his body. If he had realized how comfortable it was he would have stopped before. On the slopes the pine trees stood like sentries, tall and clear, parading for his pleasure. ‘I’ve seen some interesting things, Harry. Since I’ve been free. It would have been boring to spend the rest of my days trapped in Hundred Locks.’

  Harry was talking so softly now; he must have lost his voice. This was all very jolly. Oliver laughed. Then the blackness came and swirled him away into the dark.

  In the ceiling above the Whisperer the lighting crystal grew brighter, throwing a line of reflections into the puddles of floodwater on the rock floor. So, one of the sorcerers was dropping the interlocking layers of cursewalls, peeling back the invisible barriers of his stone chamber. The black curtain covering the door went transparent. It was Shanks – even under the hex suit, dark, spined and shimmering with multiple worldsinger charms, the Whisperer recognized the current chief of jailers. He had two warders standing behind him with toxin clubs, and a purple-robed worldsinger. Unarmoured. Ah, so, it was him.

  ‘Hello Nathaniel,’ said the chief of jailers. ‘On your feet – or what passes for them. You have a guest who wants to talk to you.’

  ‘Shanks,’ hissed the Whisperer. ‘You want to come and visit me sometime without that suit? Let’s see if those flowers you have tattooed on your face are worth their ink against my powers.’

  Shanks turned to the unarmoured worldsinger. ‘Careful, sir. He nearly escaped three years ago. He broke the hex on one of the warder’s helmets and put her inside a waking dream, then convinced her it was her husband inside the cell and she had to unlock the cursewalls to save his life.’

  ‘I trust the sigils on your suits have been revised since then,’ said the worldsinger.

  ‘Don’t worry about me and Pullinger, Shanks,’ said the Whisperer. ‘We know each other from way back. You remember the last time we met, don’t you Pullinger? You were an acolyte fey-hunter, listening to your master promise my father how comfortable my life was going to be under the order’s protection. No more bad dreams for anyone in the village. No more angry fathers complaining that I’d convinced their daughters I was a blond-haired demigod with a physique like a Special Guardsman.’ He laughed at the memory. ‘Well, I was young. You use whatever advantages nature’s given you.’

  ‘You are no creature of nature, feybreed,’ said Pullinger, his fea
tures distorted behind the cursewall. ‘But you may be in a position to taste a little more freedom than you currently possess.’

  ‘You have my attention,’ said the Whisperer.

  ‘Our seers have just returned from a town called Hundred Locks,’ said Pullinger. ‘Does the name mean anything to you?’

  ‘Big dike wall up north – across the bay from the city-states and the Commonshare. My appreciation of Jackelian geography has been, well—’ he indicated the walls of the chamber ‘—somewhat restricted.’

  ‘How odd, then,’ said Pullinger, ‘that our seers detected the residue of manifestation there; fey manifestation, which they matched to the signature of one of our Hawklam Asylum residents. A continual and abiding presence was how they described it. Centred on a house recently filled with dead bodies – Seventy Star Hall. I suppose that name means nothing to you either?’

  ‘That pollen you sniff,’ spat the Whisperer. ‘It makes you prone to hallucinations. Communing with the spirits of the earth, hugging trees, all very naturalistic.’

  ‘I will make it simple for you,’ said Pullinger. ‘There’s a boy who I believe you have made contact with across the spirit plane, a boy who now seems to be in league with a rogue worldsinger, self-taught, outside the order and a criminal. If you tell me where they are presently located, I will be able to get the asylum board to move you to a better cell. Real light, real food, a bed – maybe even moved to assistance duties – put your talents to state service and send you outside every now and then.’

  ‘State service,’ laughed the Whisperer. ‘Hunting down my kind for the Department of Feymist, perhaps? You want answers, dance around an oak circle at night with your dullard friends and ask the trees where they are.’

  ‘It would be better if you co-operated. For all of us.’

  ‘Jigger you, flower-face,’ hissed the Whisperer. ‘Let me make it simple for you. I don’t trust a word you or any of your purple-robed friends say. The last time I believed you, you motherless doxy, all it brought me was decades of rat-meat pie and a life-long problem with rising damp. I don’t know anything about Hundred Locks or seers or anything that’s been going on in the world since you jiggers shoved me down here. Now, are you going to send your pups in to try their luck or are you planning to talk me to death?’

  ‘I told you,’ said Shanks, thumping a toxin club into his armoured fist. ‘He’s as bad as they come. You’re not going to get anything from this one by reasoning with it.’

  ‘All right,’ said Pullinger irritated. ‘I will withdraw and you can try it your way. Your sigils will hold when I raise the cursewall behind you?’

  The jailer nodded. ‘Things have advanced a bit since you last worked with us, inspector. We only enter with suit hexes personalized to the prisoner’s mist-cursed gifts. Give the creature long enough and it could work out a way to bypass them, but there are three of us and it’ll have some other … distractions to focus on.’

  Behind the cursewall the Whisperer raised his body to his full height and spat at the shield. ‘Come on Shanks, you think I’ve got all day? It’s been years since I’ve killed a warder.’

  Pullinger had withdrawn down the corridor, raising another cursewall as he backed away. Shanks nodded to the two worldsinger warders and pointed his toxin club at the misshapen inhabitant of cell eight zero nine. ‘You’ve some lumps coming, Nathaniel. Let’s see if we can knock you into something a little more pleasing to the eye.’

  The inner cursewall fell and the mayhem began.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Guardian Oswald station was crowded with government functionaries, civil servants and administrators in starched shirts and high collars banded by neckties – the spattering of colours and designs subtle indications of rank and role. Red for transaction engine men, the pyramid and eyes for the Department of Domestic Rule, silver wings for the administrators who worked for Admiralty House. While pushing through the bobbing throng of stove-pipe hats, Molly, the commodore and the steamman slipthinker had to navigate their way out of the atmospheric without getting their legs bruised by the workers’ swinging canes.

  Like a sea of dancing grasshopper legs the canes of the Greenhall functionaries jabbed and twisted, beating a brisk pattern on the tunnel passageways and concourses of the station. Busy, beat the rap. Important. Business to be done. Information to be processed, meetings to be chaired. Each cane also indicated its owner’s political loyalties, the lines of the canes subtly modelled on the debating sticks used by the various wards and parties – from the tapered tips of the Roarers to the flat windmill-style staffs of the Heartlanders.

  ‘Would you look at all the blessed scurrying rodents,’ said Commodore Black. ‘Nodding politely at each other. Good day to you, damson. Good day to you, sir. A good day every blessed day sitting in their comfortable warm offices, paid for by the robbing of honest fellows like me of the best share of my treasure. Was it any of their well-scrubbed necks that pitted their wits against the traps and creatures of the Isla Needless? Did any of these ink-stained devils have to carry half-dead bodies out of that terrible jungle, Aliquot Coppertracks? They did not, because they were too busy thinking of clever ways to carry away my wealth.’

  ‘It was the crown’s treasure, Jared,’ said Coppertracks, his broad caterpillar tracks carefully rolling to avoid softbody boots. ‘The state’s treasure trove laws were legitimately applied.’

  ‘The crown, is it? And how many of those gold bricks and trinkets did poor King Julius end up with, Aliquot Coppertracks? Him with no arms to count it and laid up in his deathbed. No, it was this dirty mob that sucked away my wealth – I must have fair paid for a thousand articled clerks for the next decade. Paid for them to sit around and think of ever more ingenious ways to steal the few crumbs of fortune they left poor Blacky with.’

  ‘Careful, commodore,’ whispered Molly, shocked by the man’s royalist bent. ‘There are parliamentarians here, democrats. You’ll find yourself called out.’

  ‘A duel, lass? Grass before breakfast. There’s not an ink-soaked courtier in any corridor of Greenhall that can best old Blacky in a game of debating sticks or tickle-my-sabre. Let the black-hearted devils try me, I’ll shake them by their wicked boots and see how many of my coins fall out of their thieving pockets.’

  Coppertracks’ crystal dome crackled in annoyance. ‘My contact here is doing us a favour, commodore softbody. Your thoughts on the rapacious nature of Jackals’ bureaucracy would be better left unexpressed.’

  Molly was starting to doubt the wisdom of Nickleby’s sudden departure to the scene of the latest murder by the Pitt Hill Slayer. A Whineside alderwoman with every last drop of blood sucked out of her, left to swing from the rafters of her apartment in one of the residential towers leaning over the waters of the Gambleflowers. Not only had his diversion meant they had to travel by atmospheric, but the pensman’s absence meant she was left alone between the miserable submariner and the detached steamman slipthinker. Molly laughed to herself. Reduced to travelling by the atmospheric. A couple of weeks’ residence at Tock House, and what in her workhouse days would have been an expensive adventure had been downgraded to transport of last resort after the luxury of her host’s horseless carriage.

  Oh well, it was debatable whether anyone on Guardian Oswald station’s concourse retained a good enough grasp of Jackelian commontongue to appreciate the commodore’s royalist slurs. The bureaucrats of Greenhall were notorious for their use of the old pre-Chimecan tongue, Usglish – taking delight in drafting communiqués, minutes and documents in the dead language. Convening meetings where the great and the good could hold forth on matters of state using flowery verbs and tenses that had been brushed aside by thousands of years of history. While the civil servants claimed that Usglish allowed nuances of inflection and semantics that facilitated their work, the real reason was obviously to allow them to run rings around their masters in the House of Guardians – while obfuscating their obligations to the voting public.

&n
bsp; Outside the atmospheric station the street was thronged with pedestrians while hansom cabs navigated through the crowds, bringing in senior civil servants across the waterways. Topping up the nearby waters of the Gambleflowers, the complex of palaces, towers and underground transaction halls were constantly supplied by ice barges. But even with the exertion of the cooling pipes, Molly could still feel the residual heat of the giant transaction engines – like walking into an oven. Through the heat-shimmer rising off the cobbled street Molly saw the tall bell tower-like structures running up through the engine steam. There were more than the seven spires from the seven verses of the old children’s song now. Greenhall had more mother crystals than any other node on the crystalgrid, the invisible flow of information requiring legions of diminutive blue-skinned senders to process and shape it. Acres of punch cards to be fed into the banks of transaction engines each day, as much the engines’ fuel as the coke that fed their boilers.

  Molly started to head to one of the open gates where crowds of Jackelians were waiting with chits and half-completed forms – supplicants ready to be fed into the bureaucratic grinder – but Coppertracks clamped his iron fingers around her arm. ‘No need to queue, Molly softbody. I have a contact on the inside – this way.’

  Coppertracks rolled down Greenhall Avenue, past ranks of stalls serving the eels and dartfish that swarmed around the heat exchangers in the riverbank. The steamman slipthinker led them to a pub opposite one of Greenhall’s staff gates, the Jingo Dancer, an engineman’s tavern judging by all the sun-aged punch cards shoved behind the window – cheap binary humour and messages swapped between the patrons.