The Court of the Air j-1

by Stephen Hunt

  Stave proved correct in his decision to switch to travelling by daylight. Every morning the roads they took filled with people. Drovers herding hundreds of geese to market, young dogs bounding around the honking birds to keep them off the meadows and on the road. Independent traders, carts filled with barrels of supplies and market goods rattled past. Sometimes the three of them stopped and rested in red barn-sized structures by the side of the road, the Lissacks Commons, named after the Guardian who had raised the bill in the house that paid for their construction. Oliver would listen to the hoots of owls and drift into a deep sleep while Harry traded ghost stories with the other travellers and merchants staying in the free accommodation.

  The evenings were becoming balmy as high summer arrived, and for a while the cares and worries lifted from Oliver’s shoulders. Even Steamswipe seemed to draw barely a second glance as they passed through the rutted tracks of the county’s hamlets. Villagers in the gardens seemed more concerned about when the next mail coach would arrive, and Oliver became tired of telling them when the last time was that the cheap ha’penny post had passed him. The mail coaches often overtook them — their drivers showed no inclination to spare the whip on their poor horses. They raced against each other as they had always done, to beat the best times for the stage. It was doubtful if anyone else in Jackals cared. Penny post went by aerostat and urgent letters — where money was no object — could be entrusted to a crystalgrid station.

  Occasionally they would be resting underneath the foliage of a shady ash tree when the shadow of an aerostat would pass over them, one of the massive warships heading south to Shadowclock. Harry was curious about the frequency of the airships travelling overhead, until he found the reason from a horseman resting his stallion at one of the Lissacks. The high fleet of war was confined to port after some trouble in the capital. Only the merchant marine was running in and out of the aerostat fields now. This news seemed to trouble Harry although he would not — or could not — say why.

  It was in the lee of one of the coaching inns marking the route that they came across a party of rovies with the same wild style as the gypsy caravans that descended on Hundred Locks for the Midwinter Festival. Their horses were sixers from the colonies, the extra pair of legs useful for hauling the double-storey house wagons of the nomadic travellers. Oliver stared up at the house wagons; they were works of art, built like colourful wooden galleons of the land. Many of the rovie clans had fled to Jackals from the plains to the east of Quatershift during the dying days of the revolution. The state’s new masters had targeted the free-spirited people as uncommunityist, selfishly unproductive. Punishment began with the accused being exiled to an organized community — and usually ended when they were finally fed into a Gideon’s collar.

  Harry decided the gypsies would make excellent cover to travel the remaining miles to Shadowclock and quickly set about befriending their headman at one of the trestles behind the inn. They both laughed and sang drinking songs that sounded lewd even in the incomprehensible tongue the two men were using — possibly a shiftie dialect. A deal was struck and Oliver and Steamswipe found themselves attached to one of the house-boxes. Between the taciturn steamman warrior and the jabbering travellers with their mangled Jackelian, Oliver found himself wishing he were riding up front with Harry. At least his stories made sense. The family chief of Oliver’s wagon had a near neckless head the shape of an upside-down potato and a permanently slumped stance. When he was not drunk and insanely happy, he was scowling and scratching at his silver hair while his horses plodded along at an unbroken pace.

  Still, the food was good: soft baked hams in a peppery breadcrumb crust washed down with sloe berry wine. It was a surreal experience, swaying as he rested on the back step of the caravan, listening to the sounds of the wheels crunch over the husks and shells blown in from the grain fields. Bathing in the warm sunlight while somewhere out there in Jackals the members of a lethal conspiracy were plotting his demise. This is what it must have been like for the other children at Hundred Locks — unrestricted by a Department of Feymist registration order — packed off during the teachers’ rest weeks to stay with relatives in far-off corners of Jackals. Collecting fallen birch wood for the hearth with their cousins, lying down in glades and watching the clouds pull past overhead.

  Every now and then another train of horses would overtake Oliver’s caravan in the line. He had been surprised to see that one of the caravans was owned by a steamman, the metal creature’s limbs tied with ribbons of gaudy fabric as if he had been decorated for a festival. He spoke no language apart from Quatershiftian, and the only comment Oliver could elicit from Steamswipe was that his fellow steamman was defective in his cognitive functions.

  While the taciturn steamman made for an unloquacious travelling companion, his attitude to Oliver had mellowed enough that he was allowed — perhaps even required — to polish the holy relic from the chamber of arms every evening. What sort of weapon Lord Wireburn was, he was still unsure of. Oliver faintly recalled reading one of his uncle’s classic texts on warfare, filled with illustrations of regimental squares and inked arrows of manoeuvre. Steammen were meant to favour air pistols that could be connected to their own boilers for pressurisation. Lord Wireburn did not seem to be one of those. Its black shell-like metal sweated a strange dark oil which needed to be wiped clean every day. Oliver had to wash the rags he used for the job after each hour spent cleaning the holy device.

  A crackling sound caught Oliver’s attention. On the other side of a canopy of oak leaves a fire burned in the open. The travellers had witches with them, beautiful wild women who could twist the flames from the camp fires into dancing comet streamers and wrap the fire around themselves like silk as they leapt lightly around the grass, unhurried by gravity’s touch. Their faces were so perfect, their bodies so lithe, that just seeing them was enough to make a heart ache. Harry had already warned him off the rovie women — suggesting that any liaison would likely end in him being stuck with a jealous lover’s blade or forced into a hasty traveller’s wedding. Oliver doubted if he would have the courage to approach them anyway. The few times that he had tried to show interest in girls at Hundred Locks they had laughed at him, looks of fear and pity curiously intermingled on their faces. The cries of ‘fey-boy, fey-boy’ from the gangs of his peers when he stumbled across them in the town still stung in his memory, along with the tittering half-whispered conversations when he passed girls of his age. He polished the relic harder. That would not be happening again in the near future. Never again.

  Under the shade of the tree, Steamswipe cut the evening air with his martial forms, sweeping and ducking in a slow dance as the sky turned red with sunset.

  Oliver sighed. ‘Why did you come with us, knight?’

  Oliver had meant the question to be rhetorical, and was surprised when the voicebox in Lord Wireburn’s barrel vibrated with an answer. ‘Because it was necessary.’

  Oliver reached for a clean rag. ‘You seemed to be one of the few to think so. His own commander wanted him left buried underneath Mechancia.’

  ‘Master Saw has not known fear, he does not understand the knight’s crime.’

  ‘Steamswipe has known fear?’

  ‘Steamswipe has faced that which no other steamman dares. In the rotting heart of Liongeli there are a people related to our race — the siltempters. They feed on the life force from our soul boards, they would drink our oil, rip the crystal components from our chest assemblies to wear as necklaces for their perverted rites and not think it too much. Are my barrel manifolds warm?’

  ‘They cool as I wipe this black liquid off,’ said Oliver.

  ‘Steamswipe has been to the heart of darkness and faced that which no mind should see without being bent out of shape for eternity. Master Saw has not known fear, but Master Saw has only faced craynarbian tribesmen and Quatershiftian regiments on the border of the Free State. He does not know. That is why I chose the knight.’

  ‘If you understand
that,’ said Oliver, ‘then you also know fear?’

  ‘I understand.’

  Oliver looked at the ugly dark weapon cradled on his lap, heavy enough to be uncomfortable even horizontal. ‘What in the name of the Circle do you fear, Lord Wireburn?’

  ‘I fear that which I must do, young softbody. And I fear that one day I will come to enjoy it.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  What has your analyser uncovered, Aliquot?’ asked Nickleby.

  ‘Is it my parents?’ said Molly. ‘Have you discovered their identity?’

  ‘I am afraid no blood machine is sophisticated enough to do that,’ said Coppertracks. ‘Although theoretically speaking, with some modifications I am sure I might … but I digress. You may see for yourself, Molly softbody. Press your eyes up to the magnification glass.’

  Molly placed her face inside the rubber hood on the front of the machine, cold glass staring down onto a pink river filled with the flow of creatures — fragile jelly-like things moving in liquid. ‘This is my blood?’

  ‘It is,’ said Coppertracks. ‘The gas compression acts as a powerful lens, magnifying the view of your system juices a thousand fold. What you see under the glass are the animalcules that constitute your biological cooperative.’

  ‘It looks — odd. Like a river filled with fish and eels.’

  ‘Filled with other things, young softbody. Filled with answers. Look!’ Coppertracks turned up the magnification, the machine hissing as the gas cylinders intensified their internal pressure. ‘Do you see the smaller organisms in your system juices?’

  ‘What can you see, lass?’ Commodore Black moved closer. ‘Through that infernal periscope of Aliquot’s?’

  ‘Tiny things — with cogs turning, moving through my blood, like the screws on a boat. That’s not normal, is it?’ A terrible feeling of apprehension seized Molly. Had she been poisoned, was she dying?

  Coppertracks held up a wad of tape from the analysing machine. ‘Your people have a name for it, young softbody. Popham’s Disease. If you needed a transfusion of system juices during a medical operation you would die in agony unless the donor of the juices also suffered from Popham’s Disease. This is the missing link, the thing that you share with all the other victims of the Pitt Hill Slayer. This disease was not to be found on your records in Greenhall’s transaction engine rooms because the information entity that uncovered your details erased that data. I warrant that every name on the list of victims had the same disease.’

  ‘Why would a rare blood type make Molly a target for murder?’ said Nickleby. ‘Is there someone important who is ill with the disease — and the slayer wants to wipe out all sources of donor blood?’

  ‘A logical reason if the murderer could not directly make their intended victim deactivate,’ said Coppertracks. ‘But in this case I think not.’

  One of the slipthinker’s mu-bodies returned to the clock chamber bearing a leather tome, its cover cracked and brown with age. Coppertracks took the book and rested it carefully on a workbench. He opened it wide and Molly saw that the pages were illuminated in metallic ink — still shining despite the crinkled age of the paper. She had never seen such beautiful illustrations before, delicately rendered raised metal images surrounded by black calligraphy in a language she did not recognize. It made the linework pictures of Jackals’ news sheets and penny dreadfuls look like bored scribbling dashed out by amateurs. Something told her that whoever had painstakingly created page after page of this work — surely a life’s labour — had not belonged to the race of man.

  One of Coppertracks’ iron fingers moved over the page and Molly saw what it was he wanted her to see — a rainbow block of what she had first taken for abstract border-work around the edges of the page. The drawings were clusters of the same tiny creatures Coppertracks had pointed out swimming through the internal rivers of her body. Arrows from the script connected to the illustrations, commentary on the creatures no doubt.

  ‘Do you see, Molly softbody? Your council of surgeons classifies Popham’s Disease as a disorder of your system juices, but it is not. It is a gift!’

  ‘A gift that would let her die under a sawbones’s scalpel,’ said the commodore. ‘Blessed gifts like that you can keep to yourself.’

  Molly calmed the commodore. ‘What do you mean a gift?’

  ‘Do you not feel an affinity for mechomancy, Molly soft-body? In the engine rooms at Greenhall you divined the purpose of the Radnedge Rotator just by looking at it. Slowcogs and Silver Onestack instinctively followed you through the caverns of the outlaw realm, Redrust the controller gave his life to protect your own after a single reading of the Gear-gi-ju cogs.’

  Molly remembered her fingers flickering over Onestack’s vision crystals, restoring his sight to colour. ‘I can’t deny I feel a calling towards your people, a talent for fixing machines — but it’s a knack, I’ve always had it.’

  ‘You have always had it because you have one foot in the world of fastbloods and one foot in the race of steammen, young softbody. Those creatures in your blood are of my people. They are machine life. They are of the metal.’

  Molly felt faint — the odd disparity she had always felt in her life, the little differences between her and the other poorhouse children — rushed towards her in a swell of clarity. ‘How did they get there, Aliquot Coppertracks?’

  ‘For that,’ said the steamman, ‘you have to go back to lost books like this, lost history. This tome is from the age following the fall of Chimeca, the first age of freedom following the thawing of the world. Before that, all the kingdoms of the continent — including the lands that would become Jackals — were held under the sway of the Chimecan Empire. They ruled the ruins of the world from their underground holds. You must have seen the ruins of their works in your travels in the world below?’

  ‘Their ziggurats and crystals are still down there,’ said Molly. ‘In some of the caverns.’

  ‘Their empire’s reputation has been diluted by the passage of the millennia,’ said Coppertracks. ‘But my people still remember something of the ferocity of their rule. They drew power through human sacrifice, blended it with the earthflow streams that are now only tamed by the order of worldsingers. The ruined kingdoms of the surface were little more than slave farms to provide souls for their terrible rites. During the worst years of the long age of cold they ate the meat of their brothers in the Circle, the race of man, graspers, craynarbians, all were food for their table. Half-covered in ice, the broken nations of the over-grounders were helpless to resist the Chimecan legions. Many of the tunnels of the atmospheric are a legacy of their reign; part of an underground transport system that could deploy armies of dark-hearted killers to any part of the continent within days, crushing rebellions and seizing families — sometimes the populations of entire cities — for punishment sacrifices.’

  ‘Then these things in Molly’s blood are from their empire?’ said Nickleby.

  ‘Quite the opposite, dear mammal,’ said Coppertracks. ‘When the lands of the surface began to warm, when the cycle of the world turned again to an age of warmth and the ice sheets retreated north, the nations of the over-grounders grew confident again. They began to plot the overthrow of their Chimecan masters. This book tells of a slave of the empire called Vindex, a philosopher and teacher from what are now the city-states of the Catosian League. He discovered a terrible secret. The Chimecans and their dark insect gods of the Wildcaotyl were only too aware of what the rising temperatures on the surface would do to their iron rule and their supply of meat and souls. They were planning something terrible that would solidify their rule — but in the event, their horrific design failed. Vindex escaped and drew to him a band of heroes to oppose the Chimecans’ plan of last resort. Under the retreating ice sheets Vindex discovered something, a hatch leading down to an ancient underground station filled with sorcery and machines. Machines which were to change his body, bring him into the realm of metal.’

  ‘He had these things in his blood
too?’

  ‘According to this tome and the prayer songs which we still sing for our ancestors, his system juices would have been teeming with the life metal. After he had changed his body, he created seven holy engines to bind the gods of Chimeca to darkness, the seven Hexmachina, and led them in war against the Chimecans and their Wildcaotyl gods.’

  Something of what Coppertracks was telling her seemed to resonate with Molly — the horrible dreams she had experienced in the abandoned temple in the caverns below, the feeling of deja vu.

  ‘Come now, old steamer,’ said the commodore. ‘Tell me this talk of dark gods and wicked empires is for scholars and archaeologists — what does it have to do with our Molly Templar?’

  ‘Do you not understand? Molly softbody is a descendant of Vindex, which is why her system juices bubble with the very stuff of mechomancy. All those who have died at the hands of the Pitt Hill Slayer are his descendants.’

  ‘But it is only individuals who have been targeted — not families or children,’ said Nickleby. ‘If you wanted to wipe out such an ancient bloodline you would have to murder thousands of Jackelians today.’

  ‘Popham’s Disease is not inherited uniformly,’ said Copper tracks. ‘Its mechanism is not understood and has baffled your surgeons since its discovery. That is because they look at it as a disease, when it is not. They know that it only manifests itself shortly before or shortly after adolescence, but understand nothing about the random nature of its inheritance.’

  ‘Then this stuff in my blood is there by chance,’ said Molly. ‘I could have been born the same as everyone else.’

  ‘It is within you not by chance, but by design, Molly soft-body. Your gift allows you to communicate with the Hexmachina — to wield the holy engines like a duellist balancing a sword. Not everyone born to the bloodline of Vindex is a natural operator. The gift will only manifest in those with the talent to control the Hexmachina. In those who lack the talent the gift will stay latent, like a chameleon, mimicking the natural animalcules of your system juices so well as to be indistinguishable even under the scrutiny of advanced organic analysers such as this.’