The Court of the Air j-1

by Stephen Hunt

  Molly pulled herself along the bridge, the figure receding as she drew closer. ‘I can hear you.’

  ‹I am speaking through your blood, Molly. I draw closer to you as you draw closer to me. You vibrate with my essence.›

  ‘We found Molly softbody,’ said Slowstack. ‘We pulled her into the deep atmospheric tunnels, into the protection envelope of the enemy’s own aura to survive the blast.’

  ‹You are both clever and brave, Silver Slowstack. But I must ask more of you. They come. The Wildcaotyl ride six hunters from the race of man. They do not wish me to join with an operator. They ride to slay you.›

  Molly reached Slowstack on the other side of the canyon and the steamman cut the cable supporting the bridge with one of his manipulator claws, the crystal bricks tumbling into the chasm below and flaring as they rained down onto the lava. ‘Let them ride the air.’

  ‹The cities of the coldtime have many passages, Silver Slowstack,› said the Hexmachina. ‹Many ways to reach you.›

  ‘Are you close?’ asked Molly.

  ‹Closer every hour. My lover the Earth has been helping me. I no longer ride her caress in the centre of the world; her liquid heart of fire has carried me through many levels of her body, pumping me towards you at ever-greater velocity. I come for you, Molly, but still the enemy will reach you before I do.›

  ‘I can feel you in my blood,’ said Molly. ‘The nearer we get to each other. I can feel my body changing. I can feel the earth’s heartbeat, the thoughts of the world.’

  ‹The earth is alive, Molly. Her warmth and passion have kept me for these many centuries, kept me where all my friends and kin have fallen. She loves us yet, as we scar her skin and consume her resources, she loves us yet, as we steal her power and draw songs of sorcery from her leylines. She cared for us even as the Chimecans burrowed into her core like worms through an apple, as they desecrated her rocks with the blood of your own kind, even as your minds and souls fashioned wicked gods that sealed her skin in a prison of ice.›

  Molly felt ashamed.

  ‹You grow stronger as you near me, Molly. Together we are invincible, the sword of Vindex. In the enemy’s desperation they will do anything to prevent this. The six who hunt you have split into three pairs, chasing the echoes of your soul I have scattered throughout the undercity.›

  ‘They come as agents of Xam-ku,’ said Slowstack. ‘They come as agents of the ancient ones.’

  ‹Not Xam-ku. Not yet. The great powers of the Wildcaotyl are still trapped beyond the walls of the world waiting for my death and the feast of souls Tzlayloc plans to offer them. Only the shadows of Wildcaotyl have squeezed through to walk Middlesteel. These things that hunt you are lesser powers, tiny death beetles which clean the skin of the old gods.’

  ‘Powerful enough,’ said Molly.

  ‹Yes, Molly. Quite powerful enough. They are wicked creatures, and they are riding the foulest and strongest of your kind.›

  ‘We followed you in our dreams,’ said the steamman, ‘when we were Silver Onestack, and we will follow you now.’

  ‹Then follow my trail, dear loyal friend of the metal. Molly, you must RUN, as fast and as long as you can. Run to preserve your existence and the hopes of the world.’

  They did. As if the gates of hell had opened behind them.

  There came a new sound over the tearing-wood shriek of the commodore’s steamman weapon, like the crash of the sea at Ship Town, loud enough to be heard over the cyclone of ricocheting balls smattering against the corridor. Black took his finger off the trigger and a single remaining ball rolled down around the inside of the drum on top of the gun. Shouts from outside — the Quatershiftian officers who had been only too glad to let the equalized Jackelian revolutionaries clog up the shop corridor with their corpses.

  ‘Do you hear it lad?’

  Oliver vaulted the broken counter of Loade and Locke’s sales room. ‘People, commodore. A sea of people.’

  Outside the shiftie company was running down the street. Middlesteel’s equalized revolutionaries had their pikes raised ready to skewer the wave of attackers coming towards them. The two sides met in a flurry of debating sticks and pike heads. The metal-fleshers were slower than their unequalized adversaries, but the panels of their new shells took quite a beating before their remaining organs burst and they stumbled and fell.

  Black watched the ferocious assault with admiration. ‘I never thought I would be so glad to see a pack of blessed parliamentarians.’

  Two styles of debating stick beat aside the pikes and smashed in metal-flesher skulls — the street fighters of the Roarers and the Young Purist movement had joined forces! It was a fight to the death, no quarter asked for or given and numbers were not on the revolutionaries’ side. Soon the street was littered with iron bodies jerking in the snow, calculation drums banging while what blood still cycled around their gutta-percha tubes leaked onto the ground.

  The Jackelian street fighters moved like a well-oiled machine, dragging the equalized bodies out of sight into the rookeries’ alleyways, the Quatershiftian dead stripped of uniforms and weapons then tossed aside like garbage. A girl ran up to the window of the shop and dipped a brush into a bucket of red paint, daubing the windows and walls with a line of upside down Vs.

  ‘The lion’s teeth,’ said a large man walking up to Oliver and the commodore. ‘The Lion of Jackals. Mister Locke?’

  The commodore shook his head. Oliver pointed to Mother’s body in the snow. ‘Locke’s gone. Damson Loade is dead.’

  The man motioned to the street fighters and they hauled the equalized corpses blocking the shop’s corridor out of the way, returning with arms full of rifles and pistols and rolling glass-lined casks of blow-barrel sap.

  ‘I see she took a few of them with her when she moved along the Circle; a true patriot. You, sir, you were putting up a rare old fight too. We could hear the battle from the other end of Whineside. Are you Heartlanders?’

  ‘I’m more of an independent thinking man,’ said Black.

  Oliver looked at the large man, his boxer’s nose and thinning hair. No wonder he looked familiar. ‘You’re the First Guardian!’

  ‘Politics in Jackals are not what they used to be,’ said Hoggstone.

  Cries came from the rooftop; a lookout had climbed one of the chimneystacks. ‘Cavalry, cavalry.’

  Bearing away the contents of Mother’s weapons warehouse, the street fighters streamed down the lanes, the entire force melting away. Oliver had once seen a torrent of black rodents running past bales of cargo after a lamp was lit in his uncle’s Ship Town warehouse, an army of rats evaporating in front of his eyes. These fighters were faster.

  The girl who had sounded the alarm slid down a drainpipe. ‘Exomounts, riding in from the north.’

  ‘They must have got to the stables at Ham Yard before the hands could poison them,’ said Hoggstone. He looked at the commodore and Oliver. ‘Can independents alley dodge?’

  Black nodded. ‘With the best of them.’

  Oliver could hear the roll of the charge getting nearer as they fled into the passages of the rookeries. He had once seen an exomount being taken to stud in Kikkosico, the narrow boat shaking as the cage rocked with the violence of the animal. They were taken off their craynarbian sedatives before being ridden. Too slow off the herbal soporific and they were groggy and sluggish in battle, too fast and they would as like throw their rider and devour them. The timing was critical. Oliver hoped the steeds had only just been released, but the hail of claws across the street cobbles told him otherwise.

  Hoggstone ran well for someone whose gut had been trained on the finest cuisine Middlesteel could serve for the last few years. The passages narrowed, some so tapered the snow had not yet had a chance to drift in and settle, broken walls leading underneath pipes and lines of washing hanging out above them.

  A howling echoed around the rookery streets.

  ‘Their lancers can’t squeeze through these passages,’ said Hoggstone, usin
g his metal-tipped debating stick to push over a pyramid of wood piled for someone’s stove. ‘And those metal cans they are shoving people into don’t see so well in the gloom of the runs.’

  ‘Infantry,’ said Oliver. ‘Third Brigade ahead.’

  ‘The shifties don’t come into the lanes,’ said Hoggstone. ‘Too many ambush points.’

  The clatter of boots ahead made his words a lie.

  ‘The lad has a talent for sniffing out trouble, Hoggstone,’ said the commodore.

  They retreated and took a side passage, increasing their speed to as much of a sprint as they could manage through the dirty streets. They ran up some wooden steps and along a street composed of rickety gantries, open doors leading into tenement halls. Hardly anybody was out — with armed revolutionaries and Quatershiftian troops prowling the streets the population of Middlesteel were hunkering down in their homes. They heard the sounds of carousing down one alley. A jinn house — still open and some of the rookery denizens drinking the place dry while their currency still had value. Before the Commonshare of Jackals emulated its neighbour to the east and made the production, transport and sale of liquid stimulants illegal for their part in undermining community production quotas.

  Hoggstone stopped, catching his breath for a second. ‘They know where we are. Every time we reach one of the streets that leads out of the lanes they are waiting for us.’

  Oliver nodded. This was a game of chess and the shiftie pieces were being moved with a preternatural clarity. If it weren’t for his forewarnings of the soldiers’ positions they would have walked into a dozen traps already. Commodore Black shaded his eyes against the sun peering out from behind clouds pregnant with snow, scanning the strip of sky above the narrow street. ‘There!’

  Oliver gazed where the commodore was pointing and saw three triangles of white material turning below the clouds. ‘That’s not an aerostat, commodore.’

  ‘It’s a blessed sail rider, lad. Look at him flashing his helio-plate to his friends on the ground. Shiftie vessels would sometimes float them up above their decks if they thought they were being hunted by our boats.’

  Oliver broke one of his pistols and slipped out a crystal charge, pushing it into the gun and closing it.

  ‘You won’t hit him from here, man,’ said Hoggstone. ‘The best rifleman in the regiments would be hard pressed to clip the sail with a long gun, let alone hit the rider.’

  The clockwork of the hammer mechanism hummed as Oliver tightened his finger around the trigger, shadow images fleeting through his mind; a horse mounting a sand dune in the far distance, its rider spilling off as he fired; a woman sprinting across ice sheets bobbing in a frozen ocean, no more than a far-off silver dot glinting in the sunlight, a single shot lifting her corpse into the glacial waters. Oliver blinked away the waking dreams. ‘Then you had best be quiet, First Guardian.’

  He rested the pistol on his left arm, the crack of the glass shell followed by an explosion that echoed off peeling posters for a drink that had not been sold in Middlesteel for a decade. High above a grey dot separated from the sail and plunged towards the ground, the riderless kite deforming and drifting up like a hawk climbing for height.

  ‘Hard to control one of those things,’ said Oliver. ‘When you’re not harnessed to it.’

  ‘Well I’ll be jiggered,’ exclaimed Hoggstone, as Oliver ejected the broken glass charge onto the dirt of the lane. ‘You, sir, are quite the shootist.’

  ‘There are patrols all over the area now,’ said Oliver. ‘Our friend in the sky has done his job.’

  ‘I know a way,’ said the lookout girl. ‘You follow me.’

  Dashing through the tenement halls, the girl found her three charges hard-pressed to keep up with her youthful, eclectic running style, kicking off walls and flowing over fences. Their way became gloomier, down into the cellar levels, passages that were notoriously unsafe. Most were boarded up, others abandoned and empty since the centuries of long Jackelian winters had given way to a milder climate. Deeper still and the stench of sewage rose like bad eggs, making Oliver’s stomach turn.

  They ducked through an iron pipe and came out onto a ledge. In front of them brown water cascaded over a steep set of stone steps, a channel below carrying a fast-moving river of rubbish. At the opposite end of the ledge a spiral of rusting stairs led down to a narrow barge moored in the dirty channel. To the barge’s rear a single barrel spilled a tangle of gutta-percha tubes into the liquid like the tentacles of a squid.

  ‘A blessed gas harvester’s wherry,’ said the commodore.

  ‘That’s it skipper,’ said the girl. ‘My old ma raised me on the harvesters. Gas burns brighter than oil, don’t you know, for the library of a gentleman or a lady.’

  ‘You were apprenticed in the trade?’ asked Hoggstone. ‘You know your way around the sewage canals?’

  ‘I could ride them all the way down to Grimhope if I had a mind to.’

  ‘I believe the other side of Whineside will do fine,’ said Hoggstone.

  The girl started a small expansion engine not much bigger than a kettle and two paddles on the side started to rotate, burning the same gases the wherry harvested. Black cast off and the flat boat pushed through the river of sludge, riding the flow into the foetid darkness. Hoggstone stood on the prow clutching his debating stick, a brooding ferryman awaiting his toll.

  ‘You could have run,’ said Oliver to the First Guardian. ‘Left for the Catosian League. Tried to mobilize the army from the counties.’

  ‘I was born in a patcher’s room on the side of a Spouthall pneumatic and I intend to die in a mansion in Sun Gate. As far as I’m concerned the Third Brigade are just a bunch of shifties passing through on the grand tour.’

  ‘They’ll never stop hunting you.’

  Hoggstone looked at Oliver and the commodore. ‘And who in the Circle’s name are you two? You shoot like a devil and pick fights with as many companies of the Third Brigade as they can send at you. Are you deserters from one of the special regiments, duellists, toppers for the flash mob — or just a couple of lunatics escaped from an asylum when the city fell?’

  ‘Ah now,’ said the commodore. ‘That’s a long and cruel tale in the telling. I’m just an honest fellow whose hopes for a little mortal rest in his autumn years have been spoiled by the wilful tides of fortune.’

  ‘In my experience honest men do not normally insist upon their virtue. And you, sir, the shootist. You do not wear the tattoos of a worldsinger, and the way you led us around the patrols in the lanes — that speaks of a little wild blood in your veins.’

  ‘My ankles seem to be soaking in the same wilful tide as that of the commodore,’ said Oliver. ‘They have killed everyone who meant anything to me. So now I am going to kill them — the shifties, the revolution, their filthy ancient gods. All of them. I am going to hold their heads under the tide and see how long it takes for them to drown.’

  ‘I believe I was right on m’first impression,’ said Hoggstone. ‘You two are escaped lunatics.’

  Oliver followed the passage of the prow-mounted gas lamp’s beam, the low roof above their heads opening up into the curve of a large stone pipe. ‘I can feel the wickedness in their souls.’

  ‘I had a similar talent. I used to be able to feel their votes in my pocket,’ said Hoggstone. He glanced around. ‘This is an old atmospheric. One of the narrow-bore tunnels from the royalist years.’

  They drifted out of the tunnel into the remains of a station, the iron bolts on the wall the only sign there had once been a vacuum seal here. Their guide steered the harvester’s wherry alongside a makeshift ladder nailed to the platform drop.

  ‘End of the line, skipper,’ said the girl. Commodore Black helped her tie the boat up. Hoggstone pulled his heavy bulk up the ladder, tossing his debating stick onto the dusty platform with a rattle. Oliver climbed up as the First Guardian wiped the grime off a mosaic of bricks, bright colours dulled by age.

  ‘Sceptre,’ said Hoggstone. ‘Scep
tre station. This place has been off the atmospheric line for five hundred years or more.’

  ‘Lass,’ said the commodore. ‘You’ve sailed us too far. If I remember this place from the old maps, we are across the river, on the south side of the Gambleflowers. The old summer palace by the hill.’

  ‘No skipper,’ said the girl. She walked up to an iron door and began spinning a wheel to open it; the metal did not part like it had last been used when an absolute monarch sat on the throne of Jackals. ‘I have carried you just as far as you needed to go.’

  Oliver sensed them too late, reached for his belt guns. A line of men walked out, pistols and longbows aimed at the arrivals on the platform. From the middle of the fighters an old man in a wheelchair pushed himself out. ‘First Guardian, I understand you have been dying to meet me.’

  ‘Benjamin Carl,’ hissed Hoggstone. ‘Damn your eyes, sir, damn you to hell.’

  ‘You first, I think,’ said the father of Carlism. ‘Floating through the sewers with all the rest of the Purist garbage, you’ve found your true constituency at last, Hoggstone. Damson and sirs … welcome, welcome to the revolution.’

  Captain Flare looked at the guardsman who had come back from the quartermaster’s office, passing the requisitions list across — half the items crossed out — for Bonefire to read. ‘How can there be only half the grain we requested?’

  ‘Commander, have you seen what it’s like in the city?’ replied the guardsman. ‘Nobody is going to work any more in case they get seized by the brilliant men and passed over for equalization — Circle, nobody is sure if it’s even legal to work. The canals are frozen, the crops are under snow and the Third Brigade has been looting anything in Middlesteel that isn’t nailed down. We’re lucky we got what we did.’

  ‘We need supplies for the journey south,’ said Bonefire, ‘and more besides while we build our new city.’

  ‘Quartermaster’s people said we should wait. Greenhall are assigning navvies to break the ice on the waterways — when the Second and Seventh Brigades cross over the border the shifties will be able to help with the work. The Commonshare are working to lower the cursewall; they thought it would be straightforward to take it down, but when they tried to drop it they found the worldsingers who raised the wall have been purged, so now they’re trying to solve their own hexes from the spell books.’