The Court of the Air

by Stephen Hunt

  High in the ceiling a hatch parted and a claw lowered a limp body to the throne room’s polished floor. There were mutterings of discontent from the courtiers and palace officials as architects moved around the warrior, adjusting his machinery, returning him to life. Steamswipe’s eyes started to glow, dimly at first, then fiercely – until finally a transparent lid slid down from his brow, protecting his vision. The creature’s four arms vibrated as sensation returned to them, two skeletal hands and two fighting arms, one a murderous-looking double-headed hammer.

  His head inclined, taking in the King and the surroundings of the royal chamber. ‘How long have I been in suspension?’

  ‘A little over two hundred years,’ said King Steam.

  ‘Not long enough to atone,’ said Steamswipe.

  ‘The winds could grind the mountains of Mechancia to fine sand and still not enough time would have passed for you to atone, Steamswipe,’ said the King. ‘Nevertheless the cogs have called you. How will you answer?’

  ‘Is there a sword that will accept me?’ asked the warrior.

  ‘That remains to be seen,’ said King Steam. ‘More to the point, will you follow the call of the Steamo Loas? Will you wear the colours of the Free State and follow the code with whatever minor vestige of honour you still possess?’

  ‘If the Loas ride me,’ said Steamswipe, ‘I shall not refuse the call.’

  ‘Then that is answer enough,’ said the King. ‘We shall adjourn to the Chamber of Swords and see whether there are also arms that will bend to the will of the Steamo Loas.’

  Oliver gripped onto the King’s marque of office as the steamman monarch, escort, Steamswipe and – seemingly – half the court, departed the throne room for a stately procession through the mountain stronghold. Some of the sights he saw left Oliver baffled – vast halls with row upon row of steammen seated behind machines, as still as statues and staring into space; forests of glass spheres with arcs of energy leaping and chasing each other across the globes; chasms of grinding clockwork crunching and turning, rolling like an old man’s tongue circling a boiled sweet.

  Now deep inside the palace, the King led the party into a round room, small enough that most of the courtiers and hangers-on had to remain in the corridor jostling for a better view. There was an opening to another round room beyond, connected to the first in a figure of eight pattern.

  ‘Move forward, knight,’ commanded King Steam. Oliver watched the warrior advance into the centre of the next room, the clank of his four legs echoing off the walls.

  ‘There’s nothing here,’ whispered Oliver.

  ‘Wait and see, young softbody,’ cautioned one of the King’s mu-bodies. ‘The arms choose the champion, just as the times select the steamman.’

  In the second room hatches popped open and the white walls slowly began to rotate. Instruments of destruction extended from the open spaces: swords, rifles, maces, things Oliver did not even recognize, all curves and blades – retracting and extending in an oddly delicate dance.

  Oliver noticed Master Saw muttering and shaking his head next to the disreputable Stave. The knight commander clearly did not approve of the spirits’ choice in this matter, that a convicted coward should defile the chamber of arms with his presence.

  ‘Holy weapons,’ said the royal drone. ‘Look, Oliver soft-body. The Ace of Clubs, once wielded by Trinder Half-track in the war with Kikkosico near seven hundred years ago. And there, Grindbiter – the long gun – capable of tearing the pips off a Quatérshiftian marshal’s uniform at close to a mile’s range.’

  Oliver bit his lip. Steamswipe was pacing nervously in the centre of the room. None of the weapons were stopping. Would the knight be allowed to accompany Oliver if he failed this rite? Or would the master of the orders militant have his way and the centaur-shaped fighter be returned to millennia of suspension?

  Steamswipe extended one of his manipulator arms beseechingly towards a curved blade but the weapon was drawn back inside the darkness of the moving wall.

  ‘Stokeslicer,’ moaned the warrior. ‘By the beard of Zaka of the Cylinders, will no weapon support my claim as a knight?’

  ‘Your voicebox disgraces the chamber with its sound,’ said Master Saw. ‘Even weapons which you have mastered would sooner stay deactivate rather than feel the iron of your fingers corrupt their grip.’

  Whether in response to the knight’s plea, the commander’s scorn, or the slow procession of its own path, the wall stopped rotating and a single hatch remained open, revealing a snub black package trembling on a metallic stalk.

  ‘Armoury master,’ said the King. ‘Do you recognize the weapon which offers itself?’

  ‘I do,’ replied a steamman. ‘It is Lord Wireburn – the Keeper of the Eternal Flame.’ Gasps of amazement sounded from the courtiers. The armoury master addressed the crowd. ‘The last time this weapon selected a knight is almost beyond the recorded history of the true people, it was—’

  ‘I remember,’ said King Steam. ‘It was, as you say, a long time ago. Well, it seems we have a champion and the champion has his arms.’

  ‘Your Majesty,’ said Steamswipe, giving a small bow before the King. ‘What is to be my penance? Am I to return to the jungle to try and recover what was lost forever?’

  ‘No, Steamswipe,’ said the King, pointing to Oliver and Harry. ‘You are to accompany these two friends of the people and give aid to them in their journey. Protect their lives as if they were your own.’

  Steamswipe turned his vision strip towards Harry and the young man sitting by the King’s tracks, the glass of his visor burning red. ‘These two – two – hairless monkeys? Your Majesty, say this is not true. By all that is sacred, say that you jest.’

  ‘We have not made you activate to play parlour pranks on you, knight,’ rumbled King Steam. ‘Your duty is to see that our two softbody friends do not come to harm.’

  Steamswipe gazed with contempt at the two visitors. ‘Fastbloods – I would sooner trust Adjasou-Rust not to bite my hand than trust another Jackelian to watch over my back.’

  ‘What does he mean, another?’ Oliver whispered to the king’s drone.

  The mu-body shook its head with sadness. ‘There were two softbody guides on his last venture deep into the darks of Liongeli.’

  ‘So what did they do to Steamswipe?’

  ‘It’s not so much what the guides did to him, young soft-body,’ said King Steam. ‘It is what he did to them. Steamswipe staved in the skull of one of the guides with his war hammer, the other he impaled on a spear.’

  King Julius’s chambers were a shadow of what they had been – only the grand dimensions gave any clue that they once housed the absolute monarch of Jackals, master of an entire nation. Like the man himself they had fallen into a state of disrepair. Julius’s hacking cough echoed off the bare walls, a rasping, rattling thing, sounding more alive than its owner now seemed.

  Captain Flare stared down at the skeletal form stretched underneath the blanket, the rough wool all that warded off the damp of the chambers. It was summer so no fire burned in the hearth. Parliament had voted on that many years ago: fuel to be expended on the royal person only from the month of Frost-touch onwards – a petty economy that must have given the guardians who voted for it more warmth than it deprived King Julius of. He was barely lucid now, gripped by another bout of waterman’s sickness. Each fever reduced him slightly more than the last.

  ‘What’s he saying, captain?’ asked Prince Alpheus. ‘It sounded like something about lice.’

  ‘Not lice,’ said the Commander of the Special Guard. ‘Alice. Your mother.’

  ‘Mother. Yes. I wish I had met her.’

  ‘The House of Guardians probably wouldn’t have allowed it,’ said Flare. ‘Even if she hadn’t been returned to the royal breeding pool, even if she hadn’t…’

  ‘… died of the crinkleskin?’ said Alpheus. ‘I am always surprised by the number of royals who die of plagues and fevers at the breeding house. I am surprise
d they are still able to scrape together the blood of a squire’s daughter, let alone a duchess, to pair me off with.’

  ‘It’s fair to say that medical care has not been a priority over there.’

  ‘It has not been a priority here either,’ said Alpheus.

  Flare shrugged. ‘Waterman’s sickness is the perfect illness for our democratic state – it strikes guardians and undermaids with equal ferocity, and once you get it, all the money in Sun Gate can’t help you.’

  ‘They say the heat and dryness of Cassarabia helps the afflicted.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Flare. ‘But I don’t think parliament trusts the caliphs any more than they do your father,’

  ‘It’s odd that I never get sick,’ said Alpheus. ‘Not even a cold in winter. I obviously don’t get that from either my father or mother.’

  ‘Your mother was tough,’ said Flare. ‘It took the conditions in the royal breeding house to wear her down.’

  Alpheus stared down at his father. ‘He still remembers her.’

  ‘She was a hard woman to forget, Your Highness.’

  A line of Special Guardsmen stood sentry at the far end of the bedchamber, by the light patches on the wall where rich tapestries would have once hung, their silent faces watching the slow death of the King. Flare waved them away and they turned smartly, filing out in a disciplined line. All except Bonefire.

  ‘You can go too,’ said Flare.

  ‘I was hoping the pup would lose his nerve – leave the job to a man.’

  ‘Surely not concern for me, Bonefire?’ said the prince. ‘You just wanted to do the thing yourself.’

  ‘Novelty value,’ replied the Special Guardsman. ‘It’s been a while since anyone let me have my head and I do miss the old days.’

  ‘You could let him do it,’ said Captain Flare. ‘There’s a lot at stake now. There is no going back after this – for any of us. It doesn’t have to be you.’

  ‘Yes it does, captain. Anyway, what do I have to go back to?’ said Alpheus, picking up a pillow. ‘A life where I end up like him, tossing fevered in a bed, with no arms to beg for help, no dignity, no freedom, no hope.’

  King Julius rasped as the pillow was pushed down on his sweating face by his son, legs shaking at first, then thrashing with a last burst of whatever life, whatever will to live, still subsisted in him. His limbs convulsed and bucked as the contents of his bladder soaked across the plain bed cover. Then the monarch trembled into stillness.

  Alpheus removed the pillow. The old man’s eyes were wide in shock, his sallow grey skin shining like he had just risen from a bath. ‘Be kind to Mother when you see her, Papa.’

  Captain Flare put his hand on the prince’s shoulder. ‘Apart from anything else, Alpheus, the way he was suffering it was a mercy for him to move along the Circle.’

  Alpheus swayed, dazed by the enormity of what he had just done. ‘If this goes wrong, captain, I ask just one thing. Don’t let them make me into him. Kill me first, kill me with your bare hands rather than let them put my arms on display outside the House of Guardians.’

  Flare looked grim and said nothing.

  ‘The King is dead,’ laughed Bonefire. ‘Long live the pup.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  What is it?’ asked Molly, tapping the thick glass of the containment vessel. ‘It looks like a ball of rock.’

  ‘Here it is a ball of rock,’ replied Coppertracks, turning across the laboratory at the top of Tock House, his drone bodies moving out of the way in a perfectly synchronized ballet between the machines, tables and instruments crowding the space.

  ‘Ah, Coppertracks, do not make light of that cursed stuff and the problems it caused us – the deaths on the island,’ pleaded the commodore.

  ‘Dear mammal, master your fears. It has been inert for all the years since we left the Isla Needless.’

  ‘The rock was anything but inert then,’ said Nickleby, his face appearing distorted on the other side of the glass. ‘There were creatures made out of this material, Molly, things that attacked out of the stone and rocks. Half the boat’s crew had disappeared from our camp by the time we worked out what was stalking us.’

  ‘My poor plucky jacks,’ said Commodore Black. ‘Billy Topknot, Sally Gold, old Haggside Peter – there was never a finer group of tars to draw tanked air beneath the waves. I dug their graves with my own thin hungry fingers, lass. I threw the dirt of that terrible place over their cold dead faces.’

  Molly stared closer. The black rock glistened under the gas light of the clock house chamber, little shards of silver and veins of metal visible through the containment glass. ‘A curious souvenir to keep.’

  ‘The miracle of life, Molly softbody,’ said Coppertracks, passing a tray of crystals to one of his drones. ‘Have you never wondered at how some objects in our universe possess a vital spark that makes them able to walk, think, feel. Comprehend and ponder their own place in the scheme of things – while others – even complex systems such as the weather or this rock here as it stands at the moment – do not.’

  ‘Nothing to do with your little contraption outside, then, Aliquot Coppertracks?’ said Nickleby.

  Molly glanced to where the pensman was pointing, somewhere in the grounds of Tock House, beyond the orchard and the topiary garden, but she could see nothing there.

  ‘My scheme continues,’ said Coppertracks. Then to Molly, ‘Vibrations across the earthflow, my young softbody friend. We are not the only celestial body to orbit the sun. I believe there might be existences similar to our own on one or more of those bodies waiting to communicate with kindred intellects.’

  Molly remembered the aeronaut’s tales from the penny dreadfuls – how cold it got when floatquakes sent chunks of land spinning towards the heavens. How warm the jack cloudies had to wrap up when they bravely raised their aerostats in pursuit. How thin the air became as their airships climbed in search of any survivors clinging onto the floating earth. Surely nothing could live beyond the sky? They would have to be ice-people, able to survive freezing temperatures – with the humps possessed by desert tribesmen; storing not water but instead holding the very air they needed to breathe. What a story that would make for the penny dreadfuls. Tales featuring strange life beyond the clouds. Perhaps one day there would be a market for celestial fiction in the stationers of Jackals.

  ‘So you squander our few remaining pennies on that blessed thing you’re raising in the grounds,’ said the commodore. ‘An artificial mother crystal, as if there’s going to be a crystalgrid operator happily biding their time on one of the moons, waiting to receive an order for cheese from the great Aliquot Coppertracks. Ah well, perhaps there’s a couple of moonlight-touched fools walking the streets of Middlesteel who’ll pay a few coins to see the thing when you’re done … to keep the butcher and his debt collectors at bay.’

  ‘My apparatus is not intended as a side-show amusement,’ said Coppertracks, angrily. ‘Any more than the apparatus which my colleague in the Royal Society has sent over – which I might remind you, commodore softbody, you are meant to be helping me assemble.’

  Grumbling, the commodore left to fetch one of the last crates from the corridor’s dumb waiter. The slipthinker’s tireless mu-bodies were already busying themselves with a pyramid of machinery – sliding copper pistons being greased and fixed in place, glass lenses stacked in frames.

  Nickleby lit his mumbleweed pipe and the clock chamber began to fill with sweet-scented smoke, not unpleasant, but too much of it made the bridge of Molly’s nose ache – Circle knew what it was doing to the inside of the pensman’s body.

  ‘The answer is in front of my face,’ said Nickleby from his chair. ‘There hasn’t been a Pitt Hill slaying in days now. That matches perfectly with what you discovered in Greenhall’s records. The price on your head, Molly, reflects the fact that whatever the reason for the death list being drawn up, you are one of the last to be found and targeted for murder.’

  ‘When someone is left on the poorh
ouse steps they are not meant to be found,’ said Molly.

  ‘The unfortunate circumstances of your birth worked in your favour this time, Molly,’ said Nickleby. ‘I have no doubt that if your mother had kept you, I would already have written up your murder for the crime and law section of The Illustrated. So, what else links you with those names on the list?’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ wheezed Black, returning with a box of equipment. ‘She’s a blessed child. A terrible young age to be thrown into the deadly games you involve us in, Silas.’

  ‘You have a point, commodore. Molly is the youngest of all the people on the Pitt Hill Slayer’s list of victims. But hardly a child anymore – she is nearly of an age to exercise the franchise.’

  ‘Marking a cross next to the name of some thieving Guardians on a ballot paper is small blessed compensation for being hunted down by a murdering gang of lunatics.’

  ‘There is method here—’ said Nickleby ‘— were we but able to see it.’

  For the hundredth time he looked over the list of names which Binchy had copied down following the discovery in Greenhall’s engine rooms. The names that were confirmed as Pitt Hill Slayings were marked with a cross. Some of the victims had not been linked to the slayer by the police, too poor to warrant any investigation of substance. There were not that many of those. The majority of the names were from well-to-do families – educated, moneyed. The average age was mid to late thirties, a couple of victims had been in their twenties. Most but not all lived in Middlesteel. Molly was the youngest by far. Both sexes were represented about equally – but the victims were all human – no craynarbians, no steammen or graspers murdered by the Pitt Hill Slayer.

  Molly sat down opposite the pensman. ‘So what connects these people to me?’

  ‘Nothing that I can see, Molly. You might as well ask what doesn’t connect you. In a game of odd one out, you would win every time against the names on this list. I do need to check on some of the people not originally linked to the Pitt Hill killings. I don’t have any details on them – one of them might be the link to you. There’s a butcher down on Ventry Lane. Ham Yard marked his death as suspicious, but finally chalked it up as an open verdict. How they thought he could have accidentally lost all his blood in his abattoir is beyond me. The crushers must have been waiting for the murderer to paint a sign on the wall saying “The Pitt Hill Slayer struck here”.’