The Court of the Air j-1

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘Like the others, sir.’ The craynarbian took the unwrapped mirror and stepped back. As he did, the surface of the mirror began to shimmer, as if the glass plane was melting in a fire. A shadowed face appeared.

  ‘You have an update for me?’ asked the silhouette. ‘News of the girl?’

  ‘I tracked her down,’ said the count. ‘But your requirement that she be delivered alive proved problematic. Dead is so much easier. She was in my custody, but she was liberated by some rivals.’

  ‘Rivals?’ said the shadow. ‘Old man, I have had no mug-hunters come to the valuer to claim my bounty.’

  ‘Somehow I did not think they would,’ said the count. ‘It will help me track the girl’s new hiding place down if you could explain why you want her. I need to understand the motiv ations of her rescuers if I am to bring her to ground again.’

  ‘That is not your concern,’ echoed the voice. ‘You need only find her, then deliver her to the valuer.’

  Count Vauxtion shook his head. ‘She is just a Sun Gate waif. If you want her dead, simply let her grow up. In three years her liver will be a jinn-raddled mess, in five she will be on her death bed with match-girl lungs or some similar mill-cursed sickness.’

  ‘I retain you solely for your skill as a hunter,’ said the shadow. ‘I do not require your philosophical musings on the state of Jackelian society. Where in Middlesteel did she escape from your custody?’

  ‘Not in Middlesteel,’ said the count. ‘Beneath it. She was hiding in Grimhope — quite the quarry, young Molly Templar. Rather admirable. She’s showed more spirit and ingenuity than the grudges I am normally called to pay off among the merchants and flash mob lords.’

  ‘Grimhope!’ roared the figure in the mirror. ‘She was in the city below? Why did you not tell me this?’

  ‘As you so kindly pointed out,’ said the count, ‘your largesse is dependent solely on the successful capture of the girl. I am not paid to deliver daily notes on my progress to you. Your two-shilling whippers were of no help to me in Sun Gate. When I require a trail of poorhouse corpses for Ham Yard to follow back to me, I will tip off your thugs. Until then, I will follow my usual practice and work alone.’

  ‘Test my patience too far, old soldier, and those men will come for you.’

  ‘I was not merely a marshal in the old regime,’ said the count. ‘I was also first duellist of the court. You would not be the first patron to attempt to renegotiate the terms of our agreement during an engagement. If you have a yearning to send any of your bullyboys to visit me, you had better make sure they are not anyone you wish to see again. I will be returning their ashes to your valuer cremated inside one of my old wine bottles.’

  ‘Bring me the girl,’ commanded the shadow. ‘Do not let Molly Templar slip away from you again.’

  Steam was rising off the surface of the mirror; the worldsinger hex had nearly worked its course. Soon the artefact would be fit only for the scrap heap.

  ‘One last thing,’ said the count. ‘You are not by any chance the girl’s father?’

  A deep cackling laughter like a log being consumed by flames sounded from the mirror. Then the glass twisted and sizzled into silence.

  ‘I did not think so,’ said the count.

  ‘May I put the mirror down, sir?’ asked the craynarbian.

  ‘Of course, old shell. Toss it out the back with the others.’

  ‘You would think the gentleman would have learnt to communicate using this country’s excellent crystalgrid network.’

  The count picked up the book he had been reading. TheStrategy of the Wars of Unification by one of the lesser known Kikkosicoan nobles. ‘Our patron might have more wealth than a Jackelian mine owner, Ka’oard, but a gentleman I suspect he is not.’

  ‘As you say, sir, as you say.’

  ‘I am so very tired of listening to the locals sing “Lion of Jackals” at the end of every damn play, every damn prom. It is far past time these people lost a war and gained a little humility. I think when we have collected the money from our current patron, we should take a trip out to the colonies. See what the shores of Concorzia have to offer.’

  ‘A little late for a new start, sir?’ pointed out the craynarbian. ‘I don’t know, Ka’oard. Land is cheap out there. Maybe we could buy a manor with a stream. Free the contracts on some young pickpockets and horse thieves who’ve been given the boat. Watching them farm the land and roll for fish in the water, it might be like the old days.’

  ‘We did not make war on children in the old days, sir,’ the craynarbian pointed out. ‘We did not hunt young girls.’

  ‘Don’t confuse our present reduced circumstances with the field of honour, old friend,’ said the count. ‘Here in Jackals we are refugees in a land of shopkeepers. This is not war we make here. It is business.’

  The retainer put the brandy bottle back in the cabinet and locked the glass door. When he turned around he found the old aristocrat was asleep in his chair. Ka’oard placed a blanket over his employer’s legs.

  ‘All things considered, sir, I think I preferred war,’ he whispered and left.

  Chapter Eleven

  It had been a week since Oliver and the disreputable Stave had traded the warmth of the narrowboat for the damp ferns and wind-whipped moors that ran across Angelset, from the town of Ewehead to the outskirts of Shadowclock. To avoid the blood machines and the county constabulary they kept off the crown roads and away from the toll cottages, trekking across open countryside.

  Little of the land seemed to be under cultivation; the border with Quatershift was only a few miles to the east. The presence of the cursewall — and the continual eerie whistling as that dark product of the worldsinger arts absorbed the wind — had been enough to empty any of the villages that had not been laid to waste during the Two-Year War. Now at last it felt to Oliver like he was really an outlaw. They avoided human company, keeping to the wilds, always with an eye to the nearest copse, wood or gully — in case the shadow of one of the RAN’s small border patrol scouts appeared on the skyline. Even in summer the moorland they crossed seemed like a desolate, blasted place. Freezing nights, soggy mornings and only the occasional wild pony or tail-hawk for company.

  When they found streams, they would replenish their canteens and Harry would boil up water to make a stew from the dried meats and bacon that Damson Loade had crammed into their travel packs. She had also given them an earthenware jug of her favourite jinn, corked with a silver stopper in the shape of a bull’s head. The most that could be said for the sharp-tasting firewater was that it warmed them briefly, before they turned in at night under the tent that filled up most of Oliver’s bag.

  Oliver had also kept the edition of the newspaper that revealed the killings at Hundred Locks. When Harry was not looking, he would unwrap the newspaper and stare at the remains of his old life fixed in print, hoping the details would make sense if he just pondered them long enough. The boring repetitive chores, the invisible cage of his registration order, they seemed to belong to someone else now.

  The tent that Oliver lugged around was a strange-looking affair, a blocky harlequin patchwork of greens, browns and black. Harry said a transaction engine had turned out the design; specifically fabricated to disrupt the lines an eye would interpret as a man-made object. Up close it was enough to give Oliver a headache just looking at it. Once, he had pointed at one of the ruined villages, now in the shadow of a wood, and suggested they might camp under the shelter of one of the more solid cottages.

  Harry just shook his head. ‘They’re abandoned for a reason, Oliver. Towards the end of the Two-Year War the Commonshare was getting desperate. Their invasion had been beaten back, their large cities had been bombed into rubble by the RAN’s aerostats; the human wave attacks by the brigades of the people’s army had failed; the Carlist uprising in Jackals had been crushed. So Quatershift resorted to mage-war. Their worldsingers hexed shells filled with plague spores and earthflow particles drained from the leylines, and they u
nveiled their secret weapon. Long Tim.’

  ‘Long Tim?’

  ‘After Timlar Prestlon, the mechomancer who created their long cannon. There’s one on display outside the barracks of the Frontier Light Horse; steam-driven monsters with a barrel as tall as the offices of a Middlesteel counting house. During the war the Commonshare was shelling most of Angelset from as far away as Perlaise.’

  ‘The war was over eight years before I was born, Harry,’ said Oliver. ‘The ruins would be safe now, no?’

  ‘The Commonshare was not playing four-poles, Oliver. They didn’t load their balls with shrapnel or blow-barrel sap. The devil’s potion their worldsingers brewed up made people sick, like being hit by a dozen plagues at once. The earthflow particles caused transmutations on top of it all — like being caught in a feymist, but without the slim chance of survival. During the months it took the order to neutralize their sorcery, tens of thousands of our people died in agony in this county. Some of that filth could still be active down in the ruins.’

  ‘But Jackals won the Two-Year War.’

  ‘For our sins, we did. The Special Guard smashed Long Tim, my people made Timlar disappear and furnished him with a nice warm cell in the Court of the Air, and the fury on the floor of parliament gave the First Guardian the backing he needed to overturn the conduct of war act of 1501. The RAN dirt-gassed the shifties’ second city, Reudox. They say the stench of the corpses was so bad that the God-Emperor could smell the carnage across the border in Kikkosico. Parliament sent the First Committee a list of towns and cities that would be gassed from the air, one every two days. Reudox was head of the list. We accepted their armistice the next morning.’

  ‘That’s horrible, Harry.’

  ‘As bad as it gets, old stick. But I am a scalpel, not the surgeon, so what do I know? Perhaps the Court could have stopped the war, but we’ve always been wary of being too hard-slap outside of Jackals; the world’s just too big, too complicated for us to act as high sheriff to every ha’penny kingdom and nation out there. When you’re faced with mob dynamics, taking the wolf without killing the flock is all but impossible. If our thinkers had spotted the trend early enough, maybe we could have landed Ben Carl a nice contract writing penny dreadfuls for Dock Street. Maybe we could have put Community and the Commons on the back shelf of the public library rather than the House of Guardians’ suppressed list.’

  ‘If he hadn’t written it, someone else would have.’

  ‘Which comes first, the movement or the man, yes?’ said Harry. ‘You’ve a fine mind, Oliver. It’s been wasted malingering in the shadow of Toby Fall Rise — if we get through this, I’ll have to see if I can change your fortunes.’

  ‘Does the Court of the Air take potential feybreed?’

  Harry winked at Oliver. ‘You’ll be surprised at some of the people who turn up on the wolftakers’ pay-book. They even took me in.’

  So they moved on. Past the destroyed villages and the roads overgrown with knee-high grass and brambles. Avoiding the shadows of aerostats and the silhouettes of red-coated riding officers traversing the hills and valleys. On the seventh night since they’d begun travelling overland Oliver was sleeping fitfully in his blanket roll. Images of Uncle Titus danced before him, puppet strings dangling from the sky where the unseen masters of the Court made him jig and jerk at their whim.

  The Whisperer was trying to break through into his dream. Oliver could feel the pressure of the thing’s loneliness like a thousand-weight lifting stone from a pugilist’s pit pressing on his chest. The dream was not well formed enough for the Whisperer to break through, though; there needed to be substance to his dreamscape for the thing to appear.

  ‘Oliver,’ hissed the Whisperer. ‘I can’t reach you.’

  ‘What did you say?’ Oliver shouted into the emptiness.

  ‘She is here; by all that is holy, I can feel her coming.’

  ‘Who, Whisperer?’ said Oliver. ‘Who is coming?’

  ‘Her! HER. I am water in the ocean before her, spittle in a hurricane. Dear Circle — her perfection — makes me — an animalcule in the stomach — of the universe. So small-’

  ‘You’re breaking up, Whisperer,’ said Oliver.

  ‘Shadow — in — the — light.’ The Whisperer’s presence faded to nothingness.

  With the press of the cold moorland wind, Oliver awoke. The flap of the tent had come loose. Harry was at the opposite end of the canvas cover, snoring loudly as usual, wrapped up in his bedroll.

  The first glimmering of sunrise reached into the sky outside, fingers of orange and purple climbing down to the horizon. Two deer stood a hundred yards from their tent, a doe and a stag, cautiously sniffing the air. They seemed oblivious to the presence of the woman sitting cross-legged in front of them, protected from the chill of the morning by nothing more than a white Catosian-style toga.

  Oliver threw on his long-necked wool jumper, pulled up his trousers and went outside. Something about the woman seemed familiar, almost mesmerising. He walked up to face her. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Has it been so long, Oliver, that you have forgotten me?’ As the woman spoke, multicoloured lights started to circle in lazy orbits around her head.

  ‘It was you,’ said Oliver. ‘You who came for me in the land of the feyfolk, beyond the veil.’

  One of the lights hummed and the woman smiled at it. ‘You see, I told you he would remember our visit.’ She turned back to Oliver. ‘I had a hard job, Oliver, convincing the people of the fast-time that your place was here, in your own world, with your real family.’

  ‘I asked you if you were a goddess or an angel,’ said Oliver.

  ‘And I said to you that if the angel had a hammer, and the hammer had a nail, I might be the nail.’

  ‘I thought it was a dream,’ said Oliver. ‘You, my time inside the feymist. Everything beyond the veil.’

  ‘The people of the fast-time move to a different beat, Oliver. The rule-set of their existence is beyond the ability of your mind as it exists here to process. I found it difficult myself to construct meaningful enough arguments to have you returned home by them. I hope you don’t miss your foster family inside the feymist too much.’

  ‘I hardly remember them now. But considering the life I have had here in Jackals, maybe you should have left me where I was.’

  ‘I promised your real parents I would save you, Oliver,’ said the woman, gently. ‘I made, well, you might call it a deal, with your father. If I had taken you out of the feymist too soon you would have died of shock. If I had left you beyond the feymist curtain for much longer you would have changed forever and your mind could not have adapted to life in Jackals again.’

  Oliver looked back towards the tent where Harry was still sleeping. He knew the agent of the Court would not wake while the woman was here; she could move like a will’o-the wisp across the face of the world.

  ‘You’re the one the Whisperer was talking about.’

  She nodded. ‘We have been playing a small game of tag, he and I, across the minds of the people of Jackals. Poor twisted Nathaniel Harwood, trapped in his decaying body and trapped in his dirty cell. The feymist curtain is a bridge, Oliver, and it seems every bridge must have its troll hiding underneath.’

  ‘Nathaniel. So that is his real name,’ said Oliver. ‘I wish you could help him.’

  ‘I am known as an Observer, Oliver, not an interferer. My interventions are discreet — no parting of the seas, no plagues of insects, no famines or resurrections. Free will, Oliver. You make your own heaven or hell here. Do not look to the uncaring sky for salvation, seek it inside yourself.’

  ‘What are you doing in Jackals, then?’ asked Oliver.

  ‘Trouble at the mill, young man. There are forces outside the system, unpleasant, foreign elements, that would love to burrow inside our universe, sup on it like parasites feeding on the flesh of a live hen. Not much room in their philosophy for free will, or any kind of will at all. Your people have met the agents of this evil
before. In fact, it is better said that it was your kind’s belief in them that created these agents in the first place. They are called the Wildcaotyl. They are corrupt entities and the evil they serve is beyond the measure of my scale, let alone yours.’

  ‘Then you’re here to save us?’

  She laughed loudly, as if that was deeply amusing, the funniest thing in the world. ‘No, Oliver. I am a nail, a tool. I can batten down the storm shutters, but I cannot divert the storm. I cannot save the village without annihilating it.’

  An uneasy feeling crept through Oliver, an insight too terrible to contemplate. ‘You’re not here to save us. You are here to destroy us.’

  ‘The rule-set can’t be changed from outside, Oliver. We simply will not allow it. Never. If it comes to it, if a corruption takes and spreads, everything will be wiped out, the board cleared of pieces, every piece of matter you have known or have touched, even time itself, will be erased. Nothing to be given over to the enemy — nothing!’

  ‘But we can stop the end of the world,’ said Oliver. ‘Free will. We can choose.’

  ‘Yes, but your people are always choosing to believe in the wrong thing, Oliver. The Circlist church was good; closer to the truth than your vicars and parsons realize. But the landlord doesn’t like her tenants inviting in troublesome guests. You know the sort. Angry types who get above their station, urinating against the walls, trying to grab the freehold and making threats. When the landlord sees that, she draws up an eviction order. And Oliver, trust me on this, your people don’t want to find out what life is like living rough on the street.’

  ‘So that’s it,’ said Oliver. ‘My whole life, I’ve just been a pawn in your game of gods?’

  ‘No, Oliver,’ said the Observer. ‘You are my knight, and more. And one I am very fond of. You get to choose your own moves — you all do. It would please me greatly if the game could go on forever. But that is rather up to you.’

  ‘You have intervened,’ said Oliver. ‘What do you call our conversation right now? What do you call dragging me back here to Jackals when I was only five years old?’