The Court of the Air j-1

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘That is the why of it, then,’ said the commodore. ‘Poor Molly, with the unlucky blood of some ancient sage flowing through her veins.’

  ‘But not the whom of it,’ said Nickleby. ‘Who is it that wants the operators of the Hexmachina dead?’

  ‘The answers to that are not to be found inside this tome,’ said the steamman. ‘But we already have enough information to conjecture on their motives. Potential operators of the Hexmachina are being eliminated — so the most likely conclusion to be drawn is that someone does not wish the Hexmachina to be operated.’

  ‘Those ancient engines still exist?’ asked Molly.

  ‘If our people had the answer to that, the spirit of Steelbhalah-Waldo would sleep easier in the hall of the ancients. Three of the Hexmachina were almost certainly destroyed in the war to overthrow the Chimeca. Two of the remaining four have been lost to us since that time — I have collected as many tales, rumours and legends of what happened to them as there are hours in the day to listen to them. In all probability they have been washed away by the tide of history and the events of the ages.’

  ‘And then there were two,’ said Nickleby.

  Coppertracks passed the precious tome to one of his mu-bodies, the little drone disappearing with it back to Tock House’s library. ‘Yes, indeed. One is said to be in Liongeli, broken and near useless, a curio of a hideous race that I must regrettably admit was once distantly related to the steammen. Of them I shall not speak. The other Hexmachina is said to keep to the caverns of the undercity. Scuttling about hidden tunnels and collapsed cities so deep even the grave robbers of Grimhope will not venture there. A solitary ghost haunting the scene of its greatest moment — banishing the gods of the Wildcaotyl to the darkness beyond the walls of the world.’

  ‘What good will it do them to kill me?’ said Molly. ‘From what you say there will be others who will follow me. Jackals could be filled with children who will develop this disease, this gift when they grow older.’

  ‘A most fascinating question, Molly softbody. The last operator — at least for a day, a month, or a year — until other descendants of Vindex with your gift pass through adolescence. And possibly the last Hexmachina too. What mischief can be made in the conjunction of those two facts, I wonder?’

  ‘Nothing good,’ said Commodore Black. ‘Of that I am mortal sure. With the amount of money they’ve put on the poor lass’s head I am surprised we haven’t had half the flash mob in the city knocking at our gates.’

  ‘In this matter, anonymity is our friend,’ said Nickleby.

  Coppertracks’ skull erupted into light, fiercer than Molly had ever seen before. ‘Dear mammal, I fear anonymity may have betrayed us. I have just lost contact with all my mu-bodies beyond the woods.’

  ‘An accident?’

  ‘Simultaneously?’ The steamman’s mu-bodies in the clock room exploded into action, scattering to a dozen synchronised tasks.

  ‘Aliquot Coppertracks, say this is not so,’ whined the commodore.

  ‘I fear it is. There are intruders in the grounds. In numbers large enough to destroy a dozen of my mu-bodies in chorus.’

  A ball of fear curled inside Molly’s stomach. She had found out why her implacable foes were hunting for her. Not for a family inheritance that did not even exist, but for her very blood itself. But now it was too late. Her friends were in danger again … and it was all because of her. The hidden enemy were going to do to Tock House what they had done to her family at the Sun Gate poorhouse. She was going to end up on a butcher’s table while some history-obsessed maniacs opened up her veins and she became just another name on the Pitt Hill Slayer’s tally of victims.

  ‘My beautiful house,’ moaned Nickleby. ‘I knew this was too good to last.’

  Commodore Black raided a storeroom on the side of the clock house chamber and then stumbled out with both arms spilling over with rifles and black leather bandoleers of crystal shells. He saw the look on Molly’s face. ‘They’re from the Sprite of the Lake. I never did have the heart to chuck out the blessed things.’

  ‘Circle, commodore, were you piloting a submarine or a man-o’-war?’

  ‘Well now lass, you can be sailing across some rough old coves out there on the oceans.’

  Coppertracks’ mu-bodies grabbed the weapons out of his arms and dispersed smoothly to positions around Tock House. Black tossed the sling of a eight-barrel monstrosity around his shoulder. Molly had heard the whippers at the Angel’s Crust laughing about those things — they had never said anything good about them.

  ‘Commodore, that’s a suicide gun!’

  ‘No lass; a suicide gun fires one barrel at a time. This wicked devil empties all eight at once. She’s a lucky gun! Mounted on the conning tower of the Sprite she was, and many a time I used her beautiful mouth to sweep the decks of a boarding party while we sat recharging the Sprite’s air supply.’

  Molly jumped as a booming noise echoed up the staircase. Nickleby lay a steadying hand on her shoulder. ‘Tock House was built just after the civil war, Molly. Soldiers from both armies laid off and dangerously unemployed on the streets. Why do you think there are no windows on the first two storeys? That was the house’s transaction engine triggering the clockwork on the shield above the door.’

  ‘Shield?’

  ‘Twelve inches of layered armour,’ said Nickleby. ‘The Jackelian Artillery Company would pause before taking our front door down.’

  Something pinged off the walls of the tower.

  ‘That was too quiet,’ said Nickleby.

  Commodore Black risked a quick glance out of the window. ‘Toppers, then. Ah, I can see the mufflers on their mortal guns. Real hard men, coming to kill a scared little lass. Come on you dark-hearted jiggers, let’s see how you like what old Blacky has got for you!’

  A cadre of Middlesteel’s professional assassins. Not one, but an army of them. They were all as good as dead. Molly slumped to the floor and pushed her red hair back out of her face. She had brought this on her friends. Better they had caught her on the streets of Sun Gate outside the poorhouse and none of this had happened.

  Nickleby lit his mumbleweed pipe and the sweet smell filled the room. He picked a rifle from the commodore’s pile and offered it to Molly like he was proffering a plate of cheese at the dinner table.

  ‘I’ve never used a gun before,’ said Molly.

  ‘Lass,’ Commodore Black called from his position at the window. ‘In ten minutes’ time, you are going to have a whole blessed world of experience.’

  Oliver noticed that fewer people were passing through the main square of Rattle. The day was wearing on and there was still no sign of the man they were waiting for. Rattle was the last hamlet before Shadowclock, a farmers’ market where the drovers could trade their poultry and swine without having to pay the toll on the city road. Their gypsy travelling companions had avoided the main crown highway too, heading south over the hills of the downlands that morning. Paying a levy to the local board of roads held as much attraction to the nomads as swapping their bright wooden caravans for one of Rattle’s thatched cottages.

  The copper hands of the square’s clock reflected the last ember of the sunset from their burnished metal.

  ‘Is your contact likely to answer his summons?’ asked Steamswipe.

  Harry nodded. ‘If he knows what’s good for him he will.’

  ‘Can you be sure he’ll get the message?’ said Oliver.

  ‘I still have a little faith in human nature, old stick,’ said Harry. ‘And a little more in the purchasing power of the Jackelian shilling I gave that trader for taking him the word.’

  Lights were beginning to appear in the windows of Rattle, the smell of slipsharp oil rising from the tavern behind them as the coaching inn’s staff lit their own lanterns. Finally a wagon hove into view, creaking at a stately pace, and Harry rose to greet it. Behind the reins sat just about the oldest man Oliver had ever seen — his face fissured with age, part covered by a white beard trim
med into a fork. He was wearing a grey dog collar with the infinity symbol and fish of the Circlist faith on his waistcoat. The man nodded at the disreputable Stave.

  ‘Harold.’

  ‘Reverend,’ said Harry.

  The preacher cast a languid glance at Oliver and the knight steamman. ‘I thought you worked alone.’

  ‘The lad is almost family, reverend. And my friend of the metal … well, you could say he is something of a favour.’

  The preacher grunted and looked at Steamswipe. ‘Those saddlebags would be his idea.’

  ‘You would be correct,’ said the steamman.

  ‘Saw a fox wearing a hat once,’ said the reverend. ‘It was still a fox. You can ride alongside us, my dangerous friend. Unless you fancy taking a turn pulling my wagon. Harold, boy, in the back.’

  With the nag pulling the cart — nearly as toothless as the churchman — they made a slow arc around the village square, then began trotting down the hamlet’s lanes.

  ‘You think I would come, Harold?’

  ‘When you got my message,’ said the wolftaker.

  ‘Damn presumptuous of you. But then you always were a chancer.’

  ‘I think I’m on safe enough ground,’ said Harry. ‘Hallowed ground in fact. We need to get into Shadowclock and I don’t have city permission papers this time. We also need a place to hide while I conduct a little business.’

  ‘Has the Court lost its taste for forgery, Harold, or are you running something off the ledger?’

  Harry scratched his nose. ‘You just worry about blagging us past the gate constables, reverend. Leave keeping the ledger straight to me.’

  To Oliver’s surprise the Circlist churchman turned the cart away from the main road and into a wood. When they emerged from the press of pine, the high walls of Shadowclock rose before them, a pall of engine smoke hanging over the city. Contained by ramparts sixty feet high the town sat crowded across three hills, tall buildings of Pentshire granite and steep, narrow streets stained with soot. Even though it was late evening Oliver could still hear the muffled thumps and whistles of machinery from the gas mines.

  They rolled down the slope towards the city, Steamswipe’s red visor gleaming as he scanned the substantial walls for sentries. Counting the towers visible on the highest of the hills, the knight noted every bloated warship docked inside the city, aerostats drifting in and out of view as clouds of smoke from the mines wafted in the still summer air.

  Towards the bottom of the slope the reverend’s cart rolled past the gates of a graveyard and into a field of head stones, well tended but stained black by their proximity to the city. Two bare-chested graspers with rippling muscles stopped digging a fresh hole to wave at the churchman, then recommenced their labours.

  ‘I wasn’t too sure if we were going to find you filling one of your own plots,’ said Harry.

  ‘The Circle still has a little work left for me to do here,’ said the reverend, ‘before the wheel turns for me.’

  Tying the cart up in the shadow of a temple the reverend unlocked a door and led them into a cool chamber, the centre of the room filled with a stone sarcophagus, a couple carved out of stone lying serenely in the shadows. Reaching down to the platform of the sarcophagus, the reverend grasped the infinity symbol carved into the marble and twisted it, then stepped aside as the sarcophagus crunched back on rollers.

  He waved them down the hole that had been uncovered, yellow lamplight flickering below. They climbed down a ladder and Oliver found himself face to face with more graspers, whiskers twitching as they unpacked the contents of a coffin into the underground passage. Not a cadaver, but bottles of jinn, unlabelled and full of the pink liquid.

  Harry scooped one of the bottles up and cracked it open against the wall, emptying it down his throat in one easy movement. ‘And here’s me thinking the governor was running a dry city.’

  The reverend took the bottle off Harry. ‘He will be again if you keep consuming the victuals.’

  Following the slope of the tunnel for a couple of minutes, their passage widened into a series of cave-like catacombs and Steamswipe unhunched his back, the low hiss of his boiler the only sound in the cavern. Spared the soot of the engines above ground, the cave walls gleamed white as the churchman’s torch passed them.

  Harry tapped a pile of barrels as they navigated through the cave tunnels. ‘All this money — one day I’ll visit and you’ll have disappeared. Where’s the reverend, I’ll ask? Oh, they’ll say, he’s retired to the colonies. Left a legacy by a nephew. Bought a plantation he did.’

  The reverend snorted. ‘You know where the money goes, Harold. If you didn’t, you’d still be waiting back in Rattle. Not all our coffins are full of contraband. By the Circle, I wish they were.’

  The reverend led them through the cold twisting tunnels of the catacombs, passing as many chambers filled with moon-raker’s produce as littered with bones — a smuggler’s fortune hidden beneath the surface of Shadowclock. The reverend seemed to have moved from preaching against sin to controlling it inside the city. His Circlist position was the perfect cover. Oliver wondered if the vicar back in Hundred Locks had been helping the moonrakers land illegal cargoes in the bay of the dike too. Perhaps the whole Circlist church in Jackals was a front for the flash mob, the crime barons of Middlesteel all surreptitiously sitting as bishops and prelates.

  Surfacing in the basement level of a church, Oliver stepped out of a hidden door in the wall, into a room piled with old pews and a crowd of broken oak-carved gargoyles.

  ‘You can stay in the hospice rooms at the back,’ said the preacher to Harry. ‘They’re not fancy, but I figure for a queer-looking party like yours, it’s better than the questions you would get trying to room at an inn or boarding house.’

  The reverend went to leave but Harry stopped him. ‘There’s someone we need to meet, reverend.’ He unfolded a scrap of paper and showed the churchman the scar markings Oliver had drawn back on Harry’s narrowboat. ‘He’ll have a high position in the grasper warren and mining combination. A few years on him.’

  The reverend took a seat on an old stone chair from the high Circlist days, thinking. He looked like a monarch from the ancient age of Jackals, a fissured old prophet sitting in judgement. ‘You’ve come a long way for nothing, Harold. I know the man with these warren scars. He’s dead. I buried him myself.’

  ‘Dead how, old man?’

  ‘Officially it was a cave-in. Unofficially, well, I’ve seen my share of rock wounds and what was left of him to bury didn’t have them. I would say someone dropped your miner down a very long mineshaft. I didn’t hold an open-coffin wake if you know what I mean.’

  ‘He was a combination man,’ said Harry. ‘High warren! Back when I was last here there would have a been a withdrawal of labour until the crushers found a killer.’

  ‘Yes there would,’ said the reverend. ‘Five years ago. But things have changed in Shadowclock. There have been an awful lot of cave-ins and gas flares under the three hills — accidents that always seem to kill key members of the brotherhood of gas miners.’

  ‘The combination’s done nothing? You’ve done nothing?’

  ‘I’m a tired old man, Harold. On a good day I can just about climb into my cart myself and ride the parish. And the combination’s been broken as long as I have.’

  ‘The governor couldn’t break an egg in the morning without his valet. What in the Circle’s name has happened here while I’ve been gone?’

  ‘The combination was broken from the inside out, Harold. Not from the hill, although I’m sure the governor is in on all the merry japes that are being played here. Either that or he is so scared he’s looking the other way. The man you were looking for has a son. I’ll ask him to come over tomorrow. You can ask him your questions.’

  ‘What does Anna think of all this?’ asked Harry.

  ‘She moved along the Circle a couple of years ago,’ said the reverend. ‘Old age. I buried her out back myself. Elizabeth and the
girls left soon after. They got tired of wiping dust from the mines off their dresses, got tired of the engine smoke, maybe they even got tired seeing how little difference I was making here.’

  The reverend left to check on the rooms at the back of the church. Harry looked pale and wan. He had been expecting to meet someone different. The old man had changed, deflated.

  ‘The softbody priest,’ said Steamswipe. ‘You are threatening him with exposure of his smuggling activities?’

  ‘Don’t sound so disapproving,’ said Harry. ‘Sneaking stuff past city customs is the least of it. He was a wicked old fox in his day. Gave the wolftakers the run-around like nobody else in the Court’s history.’

  ‘How did a town vicar ever come to warrant the Court’s attention,’ said Oliver.

  ‘It wasn’t the churchman that caught our eye,’ said Harry. ‘It was someone else entirely. But I reckon that man’s dead now. Come on, let’s get our packs stowed.’

  The reverend’s church was built into the narrow terraced streets. Oliver sat on a window seat, carefully cleaning the boatman’s gun the way Harry had showed him, with half an eye on the waking city outside. Three storeys below gas miners were changing shift, crowds of graspers wearing dirty gutta-percha capes and gas hoods trudging back home, elephantine breather filters swinging from their faces in a solemn pendulum sway. Normally the graspers would have been quite capable of mining without protection — their own warren cities in the downlands were testament to that. But exposure to celgas caused burns to even their tough hide, so they rode the steam lifts underground in their stifling suits and sweated their labours for Jackals’ most precious commodity.

  Somewhere out there, obscured by the engine smoke and rock dust of Shadowclock, were the answers. The answers to why his family lay dead in Hundred Locks. The answers to why his name now adorned wanted posters on constables’ walls for murders he had not committed. The answers to why momentous events now seemed to swing around the orbit of his small life like drunken dancers around a festival pole.