The Court of the Air

Chapter Ten

It had taken two hours for the mob outside the royal palace to gather to its full strength and reach the maximum intensity of its natural curve into violence. Now they were finally boiling over. The chants had reached a self-righteous zenith. The lack of response from the thin line of black-uniformed police behind the palace rails, nervously clutching their cutlasses, was making the crowd bolder still. Bold enough to ignore the occasional tripod-mounted grasshopper cannon loaded with gravel and grapeshot, standing behind the police line.

‘We’re trying to get a magistrate to read the riot act,’ said a police major to Captain Flare. ‘But she’s stuck behind the barricades that have been raised in Gad’s Hill.’

‘No doubt wedged alongside the heavies,’ Flare said.

The major looked miserably out across Palace Square. There were none of the craynarbian Heavy Brigade reinforcements from the Echo Street station he had sent for. Let alone the exomounts from the stables behind Ham Yard.

‘It’s deuced busy out there on the streets,’ said the major. ‘The dockworkers’ combination withdrew their labour early this morning and the port owners tried to lock them out. Half of the Gambleflowers is up in flames.’

Flare nodded. From the fourth-storey palace window he could already see the storm front brewing. The order of worldsinger’s weather witches had been called in to put out Middlesteel’s blazing warehouse district. Heavy black clouds were gathering along the river.

‘Will you open up on them?’ asked Flare.

‘They haven’t broken through the railings yet,’ said the police major. ‘We’ll hold our fire.’

Of course he would. It might well be the major’s head on a pole that was called for on the floor of the House of Guardians if the protest in Palace Square turned into a bloodbath. ‘Did somebody say fire?’ Flare’s two lieutenants in the Special Guard had arrived from the palace barracks along with their worldsinger minder, a four-flower bureaucrat.

‘Bonefire, Hardfall.’ Flare pointedly ignored the order’s man.

‘Have we got the nod yet to put this down?’ asked Bonefire.

‘The House of Guardians isn’t in session,’ said Flare. ‘I sent Cloudsplitter off half an hour ago to locate the First Guardian and secure a cabinet order. If you can find a doomsman out there hiding under a magistrate’s bench, please do get them to read the riot act.’

Bonefire gazed out of the throne room’s tall windows. ‘Look at them down there. The face of reason, the heart of democracy. Bloody hamblins.’

Flare grimaced. He did not like his people using guard argot around the palace. Hamblin Normal was an upland village in Drochney outside the feymist curtain; where a waterfall was rumoured to have the power to cure the fey. Hundreds of families made their pilgrimage there each day, to take the waters and ward off any exposure to the body-warping mist they imagined might have occurred. Flare had always suspected it was a tale concocted by the worldsingers to allow them to net potential feybreed.

Bonefire turned to the captain. ‘These are the people the Special Guard protects. What are they worth to you? I’d sooner trust a rabid dog not to gnaw my arm off.’

‘There’s no such thing as a pretty mob, lieutenant,’ said Flare.

Outside, the shouting had got louder. Sections of the mob were trying to pull the railing bars out. The grasshopper guns were being swivelled by their crews to face the sections of the wall that looked likely to fall first.

‘The soldiers will fire if they break the fence,’ said Hardfall. ‘It will be a massacre.’

‘There’s children in the crowd,’ said Flare. ‘We can’t allow that to happen.’

‘You have the order’s blessing to intervene,’ said the worldsinger. ‘If casualties are kept to a minimum.’

Flare looked at the sorcerer with contempt. ‘I think it’s gone a bit beyond that, don’t you?’

‘There will be no bloodshed this day!’

Flare turned around. King Julius was out of his sickbed, standing shakily in a bed robe. Crown Prince Alpheus rushed down the corridor after his father.

‘Your Majesty,’ said Captain Flare. ‘You are not well enough to be on your feet.’

‘Listen to them down there, captain,’ said King Julius. ‘It’s my head they are baying for. No republic with a king, isn’t that the old Carlist cry?’

‘It’s not a republic they’re thinking about right now,’ said Flare. ‘It’s your blood.’

The tired old nobleman collapsed onto his throne. ‘I think I have a little of that to spare, young man, before the waterman’s sickness puts me under the soil and I move forward on the Circle. Bring me my mask and open the doors to the main balcony.’

The crown prince was horrified. ‘Father! There’s no need for you to go, to humiliate yourself. Hoggstone hasn’t ordered this.’

‘My boy,’ said the King. ‘Alpheus, it is me that they want.’

‘You gutless old fool!’ Alpheus shouted. ‘Just once why don’t you stand up to them? Refuse to do what they want. Walk away from them. Did they cut your courage away when they took off your arms?’

‘Alpheus,’ said the King, ‘our circumstances may be reduced, but our duty is not. Remember the blood that flows in your veins. Our ancestors protected Jackals for nearly a millennium, they helped cast down the dark gods and watched over the people for centuries. We do what we have to, what we must. Not what our fancies dictate.’

‘I hate you,’ shouted the prince. ‘And I hate your fairytales. That’s your people out there, and all they want to do is tear you apart.’

The king had a faraway look in his eyes. ‘Bring me my mask.’

Flare sighed. ‘Bring the King’s gag. Bonefire, Hardfall, cool the mob’s appetite for blood a little first.’

Bonefire grinned. ‘Twitching time for the hamblins.’

Opening the balcony doors, the wind caught the velvet capes of the two Special Guards. Bonefire raised a fist and cerulean false-fire leapt from his arm, lashing out along the perimeter of the palace railings. Unlike some of the other burners in the Special Guard, Bonefire’s ethereal energy did not ignite physical objects, failed to even leave a mark on a victim’s skin; but for anyone caught in the witch-light, they felt as if they were burning alive at the stake, a pain more terrible than plunging a hand into a hearth.

Flare had fought to have Bonefire brought into the Special Guard. Originally the political police had illegally apprenticed the boy into their coercement and interrogation section, using his unnatural fey fire to loosen reluctant tongues. He still enjoyed his work.

As the front of the crowd fell back in burning agony, Flare nodded to Hardfall. She moved forward onto the balcony and placed her hands on her head, pressing her skull in her concentration position. Down in the square thousands of protesters began to lift off the ground, boots and shoes thrashing as they paddled desperately against the air. A brief quiet fell as the yells and abuse faded away, a silence broken only by the screams of the protesters still suffering from the after-effects of the guardsman’s false-fire.

When the mob had been lifted four feet in the air Hardfall gently lowered them back onto the cobbles. As the stunned mob’s feet touched the ground King Julius slowly walked onto the balcony, his royal face-gag strapped on. Some of the protesters — the hardcore Carlists and republicans — ran forward and started throwing fruit and stones up towards the balcony.

Without arms to steady himself, the King was quickly knocked down in the rain of rubbish and debris from the square. The stoning continued; the dazed monarch fell to his knees then slipped down in a huddle under the hail. But it was half-hearted. Hardfall’s demonstration of the Special Guard’s abilities had broken the spell over the majority of the crowd. They milled around startled, then began to drift off, shaken by their fey protectors’ powers. Eager to withdraw before they were treated to a repeat manifestation.

The major had to restrain the crown prince from dragging his father off the balcony. Tears were running down his face. ‘They’re killing him, the jiggers. Why do they hate us, why?’

‘He’s a symbol,’ said Captain Flare. ‘Just a symbol to them. Nothing more.’

Bonefire walked back into the throne room smiling. He had enjoyed his afternoon’s workout. ‘Don’t worry, boy. The architects planned the distance of the balcony from the square. Just far enough away to land a few licks without maiming His Highness permanently. You’ll see, you’ll get your turn on the balcony soon enough. Your father won’t die from a few empty jinn bottles tossed in his direction, not today.’

Alpheus looked with rage at Bonefire. ‘There was a time when the guard protected the King from the enemies of the land, protected the people from mobs and thugs.’

Captain Flare quietly led the crown prince away from the throne room. ‘I have heard your father’s stories too, Alpheus. Leave him now, I’ll bring him inside in a minute after the mob’s dregs have had their sport.’

‘They were more than stories once, captain,’ said Alpheus. ‘But now? We’re just royal geese being made plump for the Midwinter Festival, a morsel to whet the people’s appetite. You can toss the mob my family’s bones to pick their teeth with after they’ve had their fun. My whole life is little more than a fattening cage.’

Flare tapped the silver suicide torc hexed onto his neck and inclined his head towards the crow-like figures of the ever-present worldsingers. ‘Your ancestors would have been better served by trusting the fey, Your Highness. If the old kings had put their trust in the Special Guard rather than the order, Kirkhill could have been made to stay a loyal servant of the crown, rather than keeping the crown in a box under the speaker’s seat in the House of Guardians.’

‘The sorcerers are powerful,’ was all Alpheus could say.

‘When they choose to be,’ said Flare. ‘There haven’t been any serious floatquakes in Jackals this year, I grant you. But I did not see a cursewall hexed around the palace just now. A five-flower worldsinger could have dispersed that mob as well as any Special Guardsman. But they never seem to place themselves in physical danger unless they have to, do they? Far easier to stir up prejudice against the feybreed, lock away a few twisted unfortunates and pass themselves off as the protectors of Jackals. A position which pays the order handsomely, I assure you.’

‘Sometimes I think about killing myself, captain,’ said Prince Alpheus. ‘Wouldn’t that be a fine thing for the people. I could just step out on that balcony and jump over it in front of them all. That’s about the only freedom I have left. To decide when to die.’

Flare smiled regretfully. He did not point out how hard it was to commit suicide with no arms on your body, with ranks of worldsingers waiting to paralyse any king or queen who attempted to deprive parliament of its sport.

‘Please don’t, Alpheus. We both have our cages and our roles to play. Besides, life has a way of surprising you when you least expect it.’

‘You, captain?’

The Special Guardsman opened the door to the prince’s chamber. ‘Once my life was the quiet of the moors. Leading the sheep out to pasture with each sunrise, the four walls of a flint cottage in Pentshire. That was before the mist came and changed me; the things I have seen with the Special Guard are nothing I could have ever imagined chewing mutton and bread on the hills over Wickmoral.’

Flare turned to go, but Alpheus reached out and touched his cloak. ‘Captain, please. I think I can bear the stonings, but for Circle’s pity, don’t let them take my arms off.’

‘Your Highness, there’s many a slip, between a cup and a lip.’

Ver’fey had to hold Molly back from assaulting the aerostat navigator in the small basket.

‘Mug-hunters, filthy mug-hunters!’

‘Molly.’ Ver’fey struggled with her friend. ‘They’re not after the bounty on your head, really they’re not. I wouldn’t have led mug-hunters down here if all they wanted was to top you.’

‘Let me introduce myself,’ said the navigator. ‘My name is Silas Nickleby and I am interested in the price that is currently on your head among the flash mob. But not, I would point out, for the purpose of collecting your reward for myself or my employer.’

Molly stopped struggling. ‘Your employer?’

‘Dock Street’s finest, Red,’ said Professor Harsh, watching the fracas with casual amusement. ‘The Middlesteel IllustratedNews.’

‘You’re a pensman?’ said Molly. Why would anyone want to write about my life?’

‘If we hadn’t got to you back there, Molly, your part in my story would have been as the latest in a long line of murders I’ve been following for the last six months. I take it you’ve heard of the Pitt Street slayings?’

‘Not many people going up Pitt Hill after dark now,’ said Molly. ‘Of course I’ve heard about the slayer. The papers have been saying it’s some mad Carlist stalker with a grudge against the quality, killing nobs and leaving their bodies in the street with their eyes sliced out.’

‘Not just the great and the good,’ said Nickleby. ‘Although it’s mostly the rich that have been the victims of the slayer. And it’s not just their eyes that have been taken, Molly. All of the victims have been drained of their blood. Every last drop.’

‘You can’t think that wicked old goat back there was the slayer?’ said Molly. ‘He was an aristo himself.’

Professor Harsh laughed. ‘The count might slip a knife in your back for a bag of silver crowns, kid, but he doesn’t work for thrills. Whatever else you can accuse him of, being cheap is not one of them.’

Nickleby passed the rudder mechanism on the expansion engine to the professor. ‘This is my story, Molly. I was one of the first pensmen on the scene of the original Pit Hill murder and I have been covering each new death since. As I’ve been digging around, I keep on uncovering odd little details, things that point to the murders being more organized than the work of a single lunatic. So I’ve been keeping my eyes open for the esoteric, trying to find a connection between those being murdered.’

‘What’s this got to do with me?’ said Molly. ‘I’m not rich. You want to know who set the count on me, you want to look to my family.’

‘That’s what Ver’fey first told me when I tracked her down,’ said Nickleby. ‘And in a way, Molly, it’s true — although I don’t think there’s an inheritance involved. Many of the Pitt Hill Slayer’s victims have had red hair and two of the dead were cousins twice removed, which has led me to suspect there might be some family connection involved.’

‘It isn’t whole families that have been topped,’ said Molly. ‘It’s just the odd nob here and there.’

‘Indeed so,’ said Nickleby. ‘Curious, is it not? Almost as curious as a poorhouse being burned to the ground with a lot of bodies inside that were obviously corpses before the fire even started — and half a mill’s-worth more children missing. Then there’s the workhouse girl with the kind of price on her head that was last seen when King Reuben was hiding in trees from parliament’s men.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Molly, tears misting in her eyes. ‘I never thought I’d say this, but I just want things back the way they were before. I want a nice quiet job in a Handsome Lane laundry, with Circleday off to sit in the people’s library.’

‘I can’t give you that, Molly,’ said Nickleby. ‘But you’re under the newspaper’s protection now, and my own. I can give you the best chance you’re going to get to find out who is behind the Pitt Hill murders and uncover the person who wants you dead.’

The pensman stuck out his hand and Molly briefly hesitated, then shook it.

Professor Harsh laughed. ‘If anyone from his rag comes to you with a piece of paper to sign, you show it to me first, Red. Otherwise you’re going to end up badly illustrated on the cover of a penny dreadful surrounded by twenty axe-wielding toppers and with ginger hair as long as a Special Guard cloak.’

Nickleby flexed his arms, a thin imitation of the professor’s gorilla-sized muscles. ‘Queen of the Sands, as deadly as a viper and as quick as the wind.’

‘Poor as a church mouse and refused tenure at seven of the eight great universities,’ said Harsh. ‘Not much of a story in that.’

Molly left her two rescuers to their banter and stood with Ver’fey, watching the landscape slide by. The first airship flight for both of them. Their pocket aerostat drifted through a series of caverns, some of them empty, some of them covered by the ruins of Chimecan cities, ziggurat buildings overgrown by fungal jungles. They floated up natural chimneys and what might have been air-vents hewn out of the rock, each massive opening taking them a little closer to the surface. After an hour of flight, swaying in the gondola to the rhythm of the airship’s single coughing expansion engine, Molly’s nose was assailed by the foulest of smells. They were sailing above a sea of dark sludge, sliding like cold russet lava beneath them.

‘Break out the heliograph,’ said Professor Harsh. ‘If our friends don’t receive the code they’re liable to assume the worst.’

Nickleby levered open a crate and removed a large gas-fed heliograph, firing its lighting mechanism up. Pulling the heliograph’s handle back and forth, the pensman started signalling down the cavern. A minute later a series of answering flashes blinked from the shadows at the far end of the cavern. As they drew closer, Molly could make out the outline of a squat stone fortress built into the face of the cavern wall.

Nickleby pointed to the huge pipes on either side of the fortress, pumping out the noxious smelling sludge into the underground sea. ‘Fort Downdirt, Molly. The Worshipful Company of Nightsoil Engineers and the last civilized outpost of Jackals down here.’

If anything the stench became worse as they approached the fortress. As their craft got nearer, Molly noticed large ball-mounted cannons were tracking their progress, hoses connecting the guns to tanks of noxious flammable vapours. There were gas-masked figures mounted on tame pecks patrolling the perimeter, long lances tucked behind their saddles. Squatting on top of the walls, bombards loaded with dirt-gas mortar rounds pointed their ugly frogmouths out towards the sea of sewage.

‘Are they expecting trouble?’ Molly asked.

‘War on two fronts,’ said Harsh. ‘The outlaws of Grimhope would love to back up the city’s shit, although the last time they managed that was back in King Jude’s reign. Then you’ve got the sewer scavengers and other misfits in the higher under-city and basement levels who seem to regard Middlesteel’s crap like it’s a precious resource that’s being stolen away from them.’

Their pocket aerostat was drifting towards the stone fortress.

‘Don’t know why they should be bothered,’ said Molly. ‘There’s always more shit in Middlesteel.’

Harsh passed Molly a line with a lead weight on the end. ‘My thoughts precisely. Cast this down when we’re about the same height as the buildings. Try not to brain anyone, kid.’

As they were hauled down by a team of engineers, Molly saw that the fortress inhabitants’ faces were all concealed by menacing brown gas masks, even the four-armed craynarbians’ — names stencilled above their visors alongside little silver stars of rank. Molly was about to leap from the basket when three engineers with large porcelain tanks of flammable vapours and iron-tipped hoses took position around the aerostat. A fourth engineer on a peck wheeled out a blood machine on a cart. The peck was impatiently scratching the floor, its bird-like feet shorn of all its toe claws.

Dismounting from the peck, the engineer stared at Molly through the visor of his gas mask. ‘This is the girl you came for?’

Professor Harsh vaulted the airship gondola. ‘Scrawny little thing, sergeant. No meat on those arms.’

‘No gold statues this time, then, professor?’

‘If you find a temple in the Duitzilopochtli Deeps that hasn’t been turned over a thousand times by grave robbers, outlaws and scavengers, you be sure and give me first refusal, sergeant.’

The professor pressed her thumb on the needle of the blood machine and waited for the small steam-driven transaction engine to confirm her identity.

‘You match your census record, Amelia,’ said the engineer officer. ‘And you can vouch for your companions?’

‘Didn’t leave the aerostat once,’ said the academic. ‘Didn’t even touch soil in the Deeps.’

Moving past the engineer, Molly dodged under the peck’s vicious beak and looked at the transaction engine on the blood machine. Something about the way its calculation drums were turning whispered to her that it would break down before the end of the month.

The engineer sergeant switched off the machine’s boiler. ‘There’s fey runners down here, girl. Shape switchers. Outlaw worldsingers who can put the glamour on your face too, mould your skin like putty. You can’t be too careful.’

Molly gave the engineer her best dumb female smile and when his back was turned, she pushed and clicked the out-of-calibration drum into its offsteam mode. Their maintenance staff would spot the wear on it now, when they came to check the blood machine.

Ver’fey called out to her and Molly saw that the pensman and the professor were entering the fortress; two lines of thick metal doors opening like interlocking dragon’s teeth. Inside, a private line on the atmospheric lifted them to the surface in a bare service capsule. The capsule was crowded with the Worshipful Company’s engineers, large soldiers with gas masks and unloaded pistols dangling from their belts, the stench of sewer pipes and peck sweat still clinging to them.

They emerged at the foot of the North Downs, low chalk hills that bordered the outskirts of Middlesteel and the Crystsoil Palace. Acres of glass domes and greenhouses covered the sewage treatment fields, masking the smell of the city’s swill from the wealthy homes and estates of north Middlesteel; villages until Jackals’ capital had devoured them in its spread outwards from the river.

Professor Harsh shook Nickleby’s hand; her massive arms making the writer’s seem like sticks in comparison. ‘I need to wait for them to crate up the stat and send it topside. I trust that The Illustrated is good for the finder’s fee we agreed?’

‘They’re paying me, aren’t they?’ said Nickleby. ‘You are still searching for the city then?’

‘Going to head out to the mountains in Airney,’ said the professor. ‘There’s a lashlite nest there where I heard the flying lizards have an old legend of a hunting party finding something in the sky. I need to look into it.’

‘The university won’t be pleased if they find out.’

‘That’s why it’s your money paying for the trip,’ said Harsh. She ruffled Molly’s hair and slapped Ver’fey’s sword arm. ‘It’s not too late to accept my offer, Ver’fey.’

‘I like the feel of Middlesteel’s cobbles under my feet too much to join your expedition, damson,’ said Ver’fey. ‘Besides, Mister Nickleby has already secured me a position on his newspaper.’

‘Copy runner?’ said Harsh. ‘Kid, that’s more dangerous than life with me. You’ll have runners from the Star, Journal and Post waiting on every corner from Dock Street to your print works to slap you down.’

Ver’fey tapped her shell armour with her sword arm. ‘There isn’t anyone who knows the lanes and passages like a Sun Gate girl.’

Molly nodded in agreement.

‘You change your mind about life in the smoke,’ said the professor, ‘you can find me through Saint Vine’s College.’

Nickleby led the two poorhouse girls through the maze of crystal-covered buildings and accordion pipes that made up Crystsoil Palace — most of the works given to processing expansion-engine gas from the slops and sewage before sending the torrent of waste spewing into the caverns below. The building seemed strangely majestic for the purpose of taking away the capital’s waste; white stone walls supported by temple-like columns and scattered openings, statues standing in alcoves.

‘Ver’fey, what city was the professor talking about?’ asked Molly.

‘Ancient Camlantis,’ said the craynarbian. ‘The professor thinks that it was destroyed in a floatquake and its ruins are still drifting through the sky somewhere.’

Molly laughed. ‘And how’s she going to get high enough to find out? Train a flock of flying pigs?’

‘There speaks the next chairman of the royal academy of science,’ said Nickleby.

The three of them gave way to a line of engineers with black sewage poles, then Nickleby pointed to a horseless carriage in the shadow of a building. It was one of the six-wheeled imports from the Catosian League, its high-tension clockwork mechanism far in advance of the crude Jackelian copies that could be seen clattering over the horse dung on Middlesteel’s avenues.

‘You can afford this?’ Molly eyed the pensman suspiciously. ‘Do you write for The Illustrated or do you own it?’

Nickleby smiled mysteriously. ‘I also write, Molly.’

Ver’fey and Molly fitted snugly in the red leather couch behind the driver’s seat, a retractable cover behind their heads in case rain fell on the open cab. The carriage started with a thrum and Molly could almost feel the tension of the interlocking springs under their seat. She remembered a cartoon — possibly from Nickleby’s own Illustrated — of the Guardian who had opposed the introduction of the horseless carriages; the politician being launched from a cloud of exploding clockwork towards the floor of parliament, with the words, ‘M’lords, regard my unsafe seat’ inked into the speech balloon. But it was mostly the cheap Jackelian imitations that exploded. Mostly.

Nickleby drove them through the handsome boulevards and past the stately houses and crescents of Haggswood. School had just finished and children in matching red and brown uniforms were walking home, some accompanied by nannies in austere black robes and prams just as dark.

Holding the steering wheel between his legs, Nickleby tugged a mumbleweed pipe out of his coat pocket. He opened the door of his cab and banged the pipe on the road’s cobbles to empty it. He then proceeded to refill the pipe with grey Concorzian leaves. The pensman lit his pipe as he weaved their horseless carriage between a hansom cab and a milk cart doing its afternoon rounds — the plodding shire horse made skittish by the carriage’s thrum as it was overtaken. Molly winced. They must have been pelting along at nearly twenty miles an hour and Nickleby was steering the contraption with his knees!

Very’fey leaned over and whispered, ‘He’s always doing that.’

The tree-lined streets began to narrow and the residential crescents and their faux-marble facades gave way to Middlesteel proper. At one point, Molly thought she saw smoke rising from the east, wisps of black oily haze between the towering pneumatics of Sun Gate, gulls sweeping up on the thermals.

Her suspicions were confirmed when they came up to a wooden pole suspended across the road from a couple of barriers. Three crushers — two constables and a brigadier — nodded politely. Anyone riding an import from the city-states would warrant extra civility.

‘Brigadier,’ said Nickleby. ‘Has there been an incident along the road?’

‘In a manner of speaking, sir. The dockers’ combination has been rioting. Four other combinations have come out in support and now there’s trouble outside the palace as well as the House of Guardians.’ The policeman pointed up the road. A column of craynarbians was trotting down the street three abreast, their thorax shells painted in black. They carried round metal shields, the yellow hedgehog arms of the national police painted in the centre.

Ver’fey stood up and waved. ‘The Echo Street Heavy Brigade.’

Molly stared up — the street was briefly eclipsed by the dark shadow of an aerostat. She read the name on the side, the RAN Resolute.

‘Dear Circle!’ Nickleby sounded astonished. ‘Parliament’s not sitting — who’s ordered in the navy?’

One of the constables gazed up perplexed. ‘Ham Yard’s been in contact with the First Guardian, sir. We received instructions from his country residence through the crystal-grid to bring up army units from Fort Holloden in case they were needed.’

‘But Hoggstone wouldn’t order in the navy in an election year,’ said Nickleby. ‘The Purists would be massacred at the polls by the Roarers and Heartlanders.’

Doors were opening along the belly of the massive airship, and metal cages filled with gleaming glass fin-bombs were lowered into view.

‘They’re clearing for action,’ whispered the constable. He obviously could not believe what he was seeing.

‘We’ve never bombed Middlesteel,’ said Nickleby. ‘Not even during the worst days of the Carlist uprising.’

Everyone in the street had stopped to stare up at the disappearing bulk of the airship. She was heading east, towards the river and the docks.

‘Red tips,’ said Nickleby.

Molly looked at the writer. Tears were welling in his eyes.

‘Red tips?’

‘Red tips for firebombs, Molly. Green for dirt-gas. Blue for explosive and shrapnel. I was called up into the navy information section during the Two-Year War. I was there when we flattened Norlay and the Commonshare’s other mill towns. I never thought I’d see this again. And never at home.’

A collective gasp rose up from the Middlesteelians in the street as rumbles of man-made thunder echoed in the distance, the ground trembling. The two girls and the pensman held tight as their six-wheeled carriage shuddered. The sound died. A hush fell over the city. Down the street, the disciplined legion of craynarbian crushers still trotted in formation; they had not even broken a step. Molly doubted they would be needed now when they got to the scene of the disturbance.

Nickleby backed the horseless carriage up and headed down a side street.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Molly.

‘Where else when news happens, Molly?’ said the pensman. ‘We’re off to Dock Street.’

Pistols drawn, the first mate and the captain of the red-coated marines on the RAN Resolute faced down their bomb-bay crew.

‘Back to your posts, damn you,’ shouted the first mate.

‘They weren’t revolutionaries,’ said a sailor. ‘I didn’t even see anyone down there with a pitchfork, let alone a rifle.’

More jack cloudies were crowding up the passage from the lower deck, trying to push past the two officers.

‘The skipper had orders,’ said the first mate. ‘From the House and the Board of the Admiralty.’

‘You seen ’em?’ yelled a sailor.

‘Let’s have the orders in writing, then,’ demanded another.

‘Don’t you play the barrack-room lawyer with me, Pemberton,’ barked the captain of marines. ‘The first one of you jacks that crosses this line is a dead man.’

A sailor waved a wicked-looking fin-bomb loading hook. ‘You’ve only got two pistols, that’s enough for two of us.’

‘Enough for you, lad,’ warned the first mate.

The captain of marines glanced back at one of the nervous redcoats holding the corridor. ‘Get the airmaster down here, now!’

Captain Dorian Kemp, airmaster of the Royal Aerostatical Navy vessel Resolute lay next to the pistol he had just used to take his own life, what was left of his brains cooling in the wind blowing through an open hatch.

A dwarf with two heads did a little jig near the fallen officer. One of the heads was full-size, the other a shrunken, puppet-like growth. ‘Reached into his mind and pop. Reached into his mind and bang.’

His companion looked with pity at the feeble-minded fey creature dancing around the corpse. There but for the path of the Circle went half the Special Guard. ‘You’ve done a fine job, brother. The bombing run’s finished. Time to be away.’

‘All I had to practise with in my cells was the rats,’ giggled the two-headed figure. ‘I made them stand up and dance for me. Fighting in battles, my brave rats lining up and attacking each other with stones. Hold the line. Hold the line.’

‘No more games with rats, brother. You can make the hamblins do anything now,’ said the man, his skin starting to shimmer with witch-light. ‘Possess anyone you like.’

‘You won’t throw me back in my cell, will you?’ pleaded the dwarf.

‘Of course not,’ lied his companion, scooping up the small fey thing. Not until the wild bunch’s real job was done at least. There were standards to maintain, after all.

With a spurt of energy the man and his minuscule passenger accelerated out of the airship, contemptuously kicking the hatch shut, before vanishing into the sooty clouds floating up from the ground.

Middlesteel’s docks were a single wall of flame, the fires of the rioting mob burning out of control, now the dark brooding shape floating above them had spilled her deadly cargo.

The twenty-fourth floor of The Middlesteel Illustrated News was a riot of staff running past writing desks. The clatter of iron typewriters — hulking machines that translated the fusillade of words onto transaction engine punch cards — a background to the shouts and din across the open floor, drowning out what Nickleby was trying to say to Molly.

‘Need a comment from the Admiralty Board.’

‘Bodies are coming in to the Circle of Targate hospital, survivors too.’

‘There is no comment.’

‘Printers say they want extra money.’

‘Send someone around to the First Skylord’s residence. Doorstep him.’

‘Pay it.’

‘Interviews. Now.’

Through the confusion and hustle a crow-like figure on two crutches swung his corpulent bulk like an obscene pendulum — eyes bright and malicious, surveying the mayhem. It was him — no doubt about it, the editor and proprietor of The Illustrated. Molly remembered a cartoon of Gabriel Broad shortly after his legs had been broken by the flash mob — pointing a crutch accusingly across the magistrate’s court. ‘The truth needs no crutch,’ scratched next to his mouth in a speech balloon.

‘Come you here, boy,’ his voice boomed across the room, before continuing towards the figure he had singled out. ‘Middlesteel surprised by aerial assault? I am surprised when any of you drunken sots show up on time for the morning shift. I would be surprised if my wife brought me a glass of warm jinn before tucking me up for the night. When I see one of our own Circle-damned aerostats dropping firebombs on the capital of our great and glorious land, I am not, sir, surprised. I am violated. I am jiggered by the enormity of it all. Pull the lead on that subtitle. If I ever see the like of that again on one of my inside pages, I will be surprising you by pulling your record of employment from the punch card drawer and feeding it into the fires still burning along the east bank of the river, do you understand?’

Turning from the quivering writer, the editor spotted Nickleby and Molly and swung his way over to them, stabbing his twin crutches into the floor like a duellist’s sword blows. ‘Found another waif for me to employ, Nickleby? I’ll be applying to Greenhall to re-register the paper as a Circlist charity before the week is out.’

Ver’fey had already disappeared with copy on the attack for the printers, but the editor obviously had a good memory for details. Molly and her rescuer followed the old man into his office, large round crystal portholes cut into the walls of the pneumatic structure giving them a good view of the smoke streaming into the air at the other end of the city. When the door was shut the din of the pensmen’s pit was instantly cut off; in the silence Molly could hear the soft flow of water shifting through the building’s rubber walls.

‘Walls have ears, eh?’ said the editor. ‘So this is the girl? Right now, m’dear, I could get more money for trading your head than I could if I sold The Illustrated lock, stock.’

‘It’s a strange old world,’ said Molly.

Broad looked out at the smoke gushing into the sky. ‘Indeed it is, m’dear. My paper would be empty most days if it were not.’

‘I told you there was more to the Pitt Hill slayings than a lone lunatic,’ said Nickleby. ‘Molly here is a proof of it, I am sure.’

‘We need to find the link,’ said the editor. ‘What connects this young lady to a bunch of society’s finest with their blood leeched out like so much desert butcher’s meat?’

‘You’ll protect me?’ said Molly. ‘Help me find the truth?’

‘Truth has a price,’ replied the editor, raising his crutches. ‘It extracts a cost from those that stare at it too long, those that seek it too zealously, eh Nickleby?’ He looked meaningfully at the journalist. Nickleby shrugged and looked away. ‘Well, m’fella here has the best nose for a story of anyone on The Illustrated. If someone can help you work out why your dear flame-coloured head is worth a Guardian’s ransom, it’s Nickleby here. As for protection, where’s that fierce bookworm with the amazon-sized arms — isn’t she on the payroll?’

‘Just for the finder’s fee,’ said Nickleby. ‘She’s off to parts foreign now.’

The editor shook his head. ‘More grist for the mill for the penny sheets, I don’t doubt. Well, I can always pull a couple of whippers from that gang of thieves I pay to guard the print mill and have them follow you about.’

Nickleby shook his head. ‘Anonymity is our best defence now, Gabriel. None of the mug-hunters and toppers looking for Molly knows that she is in our care. If you post an armed guard outside my gates, word’s going to get back to the flash mob sooner or later. People will start wondering why.’

‘So be it,’ said the editor. ‘That old salt who hangs around your place looks like he might be handy with a Sleeping Henry, eh?’

There was a knock at the door and a breathless runner stumbled in holding out a note. ‘The Board of the Admiralty denies that the Resolute had orders to even be in Middlesteel, let alone bomb it. They’re sending the RAN Amethyst and Upholder to escort the Resolute back to Shadowclock, with orders to bring her down if she resists.’

‘By the Lord Harry,’ exclaimed Broad. ‘A duel over the city. You boy, tell the desk to make ready for a second edition. Nickleby, you did some time on the decks, does the Board’s story sound likely to you?’

‘An airmaster can be hung for showing initiative with their position in a squadron formation,’ said Nickleby. ‘A skipper doesn’t change the crew’s jinn ration without written orders from the Board.’

‘Fella must have gone barking mad,’ said the editor. ‘Boy, boy, send someone down to the taverns where the jack cloudies soak their troubles, get me the name of the skipper of the Resolute. Anything about his background — see if this chappie was barking, history of lunacy in the blood, all of that.’

‘Dear Circle,’ said Nickleby. ‘Our own city. I still can’t believe it; it’s like a dream.’

‘Stuff of nightmares more like, eh?’ said Broad. ‘We’ll get to the bottom of this one and have someone’s head on the end of a pike for it.’

‘By writing about it?’ said Molly.

Broad furrowed his brow and picked up an edition of his broadsheet. ‘It’s easy to mistake this for a couple of sheets of wood pulp, m’dear, but you’d be wrong. This is a weapon. No less than that bloated airship floating above Middlesteel; and this can do a great deal more than burn a district to the ground. It can inflame an entire nation to arms. It can send the people stampeding in one direction or t’other at a polling booth. It can burrow into the heart of the flash mob and turn over the stone of the underworld so everyone can see the worms and maggots crawling through our sewage. It can uproot the stench and sweat of a Stallwood Avenue mill and slap it down inside the comfortable five-storey house of an articled clerk. It can take a selfless act of bravery and make it seem like the grossest foolhardiness — or it can take an idiot and raise him up to strut across the floor of parliament like a peacock.’

‘But it extracts its price, Molly,’ said Nickleby.

‘Not today,’ said Broad, pointing to the silhouette of the Resolute, still cloaked by waves of black smoke. ‘Today the city has paid the bill for us.’

Count Vauxtion swirled the remains of his brandy in the large glass. As they should, the legs of the drink made golden fingers against the side of the crystal. Only three bottles of the 1560 left now. The Carlists had seized the rest of his cellar when the Quatershiftian nobility found itself overrun during the people’s revolution. Drunk in a single evening to fuel the orgy of devastation which saw his chateau razed to the ground, his family arrested, his workers ejected from their cottages and most senseless of all — the grain stores torched. So much of his legacy, his life had gone in that single night.

Ka’oard entered the library, holding a package wrapped in brown paper. ‘I hope you are not brooding again, sir.’

Count Vauxtion allowed the craynarbian retainer to take the brandy glass out of his hand. ‘I find it hard to focus on the words in the books, old shell. I am not sure if that is a function of my fading sight or the distraction of too many accumulated memories.’

The craynarbian placed the package on the reading table. ‘Your beard and my shell are turning white together, sir.’

‘Do you remember the hills outside Estreal, Ka’oard? Your shell took a few cracks then.’

‘The King’s dispute with the Steammen Free State?’ said the craynarbian. ‘I remember it well, sir. The cavalry made a disastrous charge against the steammen knights. Colonel Weltard died in the saddle, taken down by a flame-gun.’

‘He always was a fool. Brave as a sand lion, of course, but a fool,’ said the count. ‘Had a lovely wife just as fearless as he was. She had a few choice words for the crowd when they took her to the Gideon’s Collar, as I recall. Stood on that platform and cursed the mob for ten minutes before the Carlists dragged her into the bolter.’

‘At least the colonel was spared the sight of that, sir,’ said the craynarbian.

‘Yes,’ sighed the count. ‘What a pair we make, old shell. We should be sitting by a river in Vauxtion, drowning worms with a rod and a cast, watching our grandchildren throw stones at each other.’

‘As I recall it was mostly you who threw stones at me, sir,’ said the retainer.

‘I was a curious lad,’ said the count. ‘I liked the sound they made as they pinged off your back. Besides, you used to poke me with your damn sword arm when I was given the bunk above yours in the regiment. Pretended you were sleep-walking as I remember it.’

‘My sword arm is rather blunt now, sir.’

The count picked up the package he had been brought and began to unwrap the paper. ‘It is still sharp enough, I think. This was delivered by a private courier, I presume?’

‘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.