The Court of the Air

Chapter Twelve

Molly stared up at the tower. It was not as tall as one of Sun Gate’s counting houses — perhaps only eight storeys — but the way it rose out of the tranquillity of the private garden dominating the topiary below gave it an extra sense of scale. An illuminated clock face crowned the square tower, two massive iron hands keeping time in a stately passage against the yellow light. Something Damson Darnay had once said to Molly back in the poorhouse jumped unbidden to mind. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

‘You have rooms here?’ asked Molly.

Nickleby pointed his six-wheel horseless carriage into a coach house next door to the tower. ‘Tock House is mine, or should I say ours.’

‘You’re a pensman,’ said Molly. ‘How in the name of the Circle is this tower yours? Who are you, the part of the Quatershiftian royal family that didn’t hang around for the revolution?’

Nickleby carefully nosed the head of the horseless carriage into a steel dock, then, jumping down, he lit a boiler in the corner of the coach house — the carriage’s high tension clockwork whining as its drums were put under pressure by the steam-hissing mechanism, rewinding the engine for its next journey. ‘No noble blood in my family’s veins, Molly. Unless you consider the blood of poets and theatre players to be noble.’

Molly pointed up at the tower. ‘A good opening night paid for that, did it?’

‘I thought you were an aficionado of the pulp press, Molly? You must have missed the issues of the penny dreadfuls where my companions and myself found the wreckage of the PeacockHerne on the Isla Needless.’

‘The King’s airship, that was you?’

Nickleby gave a little bow. ‘I was covering the expedition for The Illustrated — of course, we weren’t looking for treasure; a safe passage across the Fire Sea was what the university had paid for.’

‘I thought everyone on the expedition died of a curse,’ said Molly.

‘Tropical disease,’ said Nickleby. ‘And there were enough of us left alive for parliament to invoke the crown treasure trove laws on the contents of the Peacock Herne. But even after the House of Guardians got its snout in the trough, our share of the treasure was enough to pay for a few luxuries.’ He lovingly patted the cab of the carriage.

They walked out of the coach house and into the evening air. Tending the lawn were a handful of small iron crabs, busy pulling weeds and cropping grass; Molly nearly tripped over one before she realized what it was. ‘There’s a steamman slip-thinker here?’

‘I told you I lived with a couple of companions. Come on, they should be inside. Aliquot Coppertracks is the reason we survived the Isla Needless. They can die of boiler sickness and crystal rot, but thank the Circle that tropical fever has a hard time with steammen.’

Molly tried to pick up one of the metal crabs but the drone sidled out of her reach. Slipthinkers were rare outside of the Steammen Free State; minds so powerful they could diffuse their consciousness among multiple bodies. It was rumoured that even King Steam and his royal architects did not fully understand the detail of their layout, using scavenged plans from the Camlantean age in their construction. Those that did not slide into madness provided the metal race with their greatest shamen and philosophers. She had never even seen a slipthinker, let alone met one.

Inside the tower’s hall they were greeted by a bear of a man — at first Molly thought he might be a retainer, but then she spotted the silver trident on his jacket as his voice boomed out. ‘So you are back again, Silas Nickleby. And us not knowing if you were dead or trapped a thousand leagues under the earth.’

‘It takes more than a pocket aerostat jaunt down to Grimhope to throw out my stars, commodore,’ said the pensman. ‘This is Molly Templar. She will be our house-guest for a while. Molly, this is Commodore Jared Black — it was his submersible that took us on the little trip I was telling you about.’

‘Your stars indeed,’ said the commodore, running a hand thoughtfully through his rambling saltpepper beard. ‘Lucky for you, but not so lucky for my blessed boat — the poor wrecked Sprite of the Lake lying beached on the shores of that swamp at the end of the world.’

‘Sunk by age,’ whispered Nickleby to Molly. ‘It leaked most of the trip. We were lucky we didn’t end up roasting like beef on a spit underneath the Fire Sea.’

‘Ah, Molly,’ said the commodore. ‘You are welcome to the hospitality of Tock House. Small recompense has its walls proved for a glorious life lived free on the oceans. Poor old Blacky. Deprived of his beautiful craft and cheated out of the bulk of his fortune by the swindling bureaucrats of Jackals. Us stumbling around the jungle, half dead of the mortal tropical plague and the only piece of luck that’s thrown our way by the Circle is stolen by grasping counting-house men from Greenhall. Let me take you to our kitchen, girl, and I will find us some paltry fare to commiserate the rule of thieves we suffer under while we swap the sad tales of our lives.’

‘Time for that later, Jared,’ said Nickleby to the submariner. ‘I need a hand first with some boxes for Aliquot.’

Molly followed the odd pair back out to the coach house, where they began unloading crates of what looked like old newspapers from a compartment in the back of the horseless carriage. ‘You going to burn those on your fire?’

The commodore’s face was turning red with the effort of lifting out the heavy crates. ‘Burn them, lass? Burn them on the fire of Aliquot Coppertracks’ brilliance, perhaps.’

Hefting the crates back to Tock House, the two men loaded them into a dumb waiter, Nickleby pulling a cord to lift the boxes out of sight. Following the pair up a spiral staircase, Molly wished the current owners had gone to the expense of fitting Tock House with a dumb waiter for the building’s guests. But, lack of a lifting room aside, the tower had obviously had money lavished on it. The walls were lined with panels of Haslingshire oak, the floors marble and polished starstone, oil-fired chandeliers augmenting the summer light spilling in through stained-glass windows. Rainbow-bright scenes of the King having his arms cut away against a backdrop of columns of soldiers wearing roundhead-style helmets dated the building as at least six hundred years old. Built perhaps by a merchant, bishop or parliamentarian who had been on the winning side of the civil war.

Near the top of the tower they found the crates of newspaper still stacked in the cupboard-sized dumb waiter. Molly helped the pair carry the crates along the carpeted passage to its end, where a door lay slightly ajar. Black kicked the door open with one of his sailor’s boots and they lugged the boxes inside.

‘More grist for the mill, Aliquot,’ announced Nickleby.

They stood inside a hall containing the tower’s clock mechanism, the glass of the massive clockface illuminating laboratory tables covered with machinery and chemical stills, smoking glass beakers and coiled tubes filled with bubbling green liquids. The faint smell of sulphur, though, was coming from one of the steammen in the room, a squat creature sitting on two burnished orange tracks, his head a large transparent crystal dome filled with forks of ionised blue energy which seemed to rotate around the inside of his clear skull. There were other smaller steammen in the room, thin iron things the size of ten-year-old children, all identical, with bottle-shaped heads containing a single telescope-like eye. They would be some of the slipthinker’s mu-bodies, drones possessed by his intellect.

‘And blessed heavy, too,’ added the commodore. ‘The tree that gave its life for these papers must have been mortal offended by the lumberman’s axe. It’s been trying to get poor old Black’s heart to fail every step of the passage.’

‘Newspapers?’ said the tracked steamman. ‘You have brought me newspapers? Why did you not say so? Place them on the table at once.’ Its voicebox had a slight echo, making the steamman sound distracted. As soon as Nickleby and the commodore thumped the crates down, two of the small iron goblins were crawling over them, ripping out old news sheets, their telescope heads scanning the text at a breakneck pace.

Molly picked up a journal out of the box she had carried through. ‘Field and Fern?’

‘Ah, lass,’ said the commodore. ‘Poor old Coppertracks is a slipthinker through and through. He needs new information to process in giant quantities or he starts to act as odd as a dancing hare in Damp-month. The paper is an anchor on his boat, the weight of it keeping that shiny mind of his from rising up out of sight like a village struck by a float quake. But I don’t begrudge him the fortune we spend on subscriptions, for without him, the pensman and me would be as dead as the rest of them on the Isla Needless. There’s more cleverness in that fizzing old noggin of his than half the transaction engines in Greenhall.’

‘A young softbody,’ said Coppertracks, noticing Molly in the confusion of the laboratory for the first time. ‘The young softbody. I know you, yes I do.’

‘I am sure I would have remembered meeting a slipthinker,’ said Molly, giving a polite little curtsey.

‘The memories of the fallen, dear mammal,’ said Coppertracks, pointing to a table pushed against the crystal wall of the clockface. On the table was a steamman skull, long cables dangling from the metal like dreadlocks.

‘The controller from the atmospheric!’ said Molly.

‘One of the people of the metal was guided to Redrust’s corpse by the Steamo Loas,’ said Coppertracks. ‘The controller’s killers had rolled his body into Old Mother Gambleflowers, hoping the waters of the river would wash over their dark deed, but at least I got to his body before some eel fisherman dredged up his cadaver and tried to sell his components on to a mechomancer.’ Coppertracks pointed to the lifeless skull. ‘Whatever torturer took him apart tried to erase his silicate boards with electromagnetic force, but they did a poor job of it. I have many partial memories, including Redrust throwing the cogs for you, Molly softbody.’

‘He helped me escape to the undercity,’ said Molly.

‘A kindness which cost him his life,’ said Coppertracks. ‘Redrust was a powerful mystic, he could ride the Loas with great accuracy.’

‘Molly was worried for two of her friends, Aliquot,’ explained Nickleby. ‘Two of the people of the metal who assisted her down in Grimhope.’

‘Indeed, dear mammal,’ said Coppertracks. ‘I have already thrown the Gear-gi-ju wheels for Slowcogs and Silver Onestack, shed my own oil for the spirits. King Steam will want to receive word of their fate along with the soul board of the controller.’

‘They were wounded when I left them,’ said Molly. ‘Seriously.’

‘It is most perplexing,’ said Coppertracks. ‘The spirits always know when one of the people of the metal has joined them. Yet the cogs I threw could not give a clear answer as to their fate. It is as if they are alive but dead at the same time. That is not something I have ever encountered before. King Steam has more powerful mystics than I at court and I hope one of them will be able to receive a truer reading.’

Molly rubbed her eyes. ‘Slowcogs, the controller, my friends at the workhouse, Onestack, everyone who has tried to help me has ended up getting hurt. They have all paid for me.’

‘These are strange days, Molly softbody,’ said Coppertracks, the lightning storm of his mind flaring up underneath his clear, egg-shaped skull. ‘There is confusion in the spirit world — our ancestors and the Steamo Loas do not rest easy. And there are disturbances in the world of information, the subtle suggestion of the hand of forces the like of which we have not encountered before, now at work. You must hold to the knowledge that the controller read your part in this and judged it important enough to give his life to keep you safe.’

‘Sweet mercy of the Circle, Aliquot Coppertracks,’ said the commodore. ‘Do not speak of such wicked things. Let’s go down to the kitchen and crack open a bottle of jinn or two to whet our appetite for supper. Let’s not talk of strange currents and disturbed spirits. Surely you did not drag our poor diseased bodies out of that hellish jungle just for the three of us to go plunging ourselves into danger back home in Jackals.’

‘Molly didn’t ask to have a Guardian’s ransom placed on her head, Jared,’ said Nickleby. ‘Any more than the homes down on the docks asked to be firebombed by an aerostat; any more than the victims of the Pitt Hill Slayer asked to be picked up and murdered.’

The commodore scratched at his beard in despair. ‘If only we had my blessed boat, we could head out to sea and submerge to safety. You’d have been protected on board the Sprite of the Lake, lass, and I could have shown you the wonders of the world’s oceans on my darling boat. Steam beds off the Fire Sea, the sunken stone towers of old Lostangels, slipsharps schooling under the Straits of Quat. But her wreckage litters the beach of that cursed isle, while I rot away here in the decadent capital of ancient Jackals.’

Nickleby and the steamman seemed oblivious to the large submariner’s inexhaustible well of self-pity. Coppertracks continued his work assembling a bank of strange-looking machinery while his drones devoured the crates of reading material.

The pensman turned by the door. ‘Aliquot, I don’t think that any of the mug-hunters know yet that young Damson Templar is our guest, but in case they do …’

‘Mortal Circle,’ wheezed the commodore, stumbling after Molly and Nickleby. ‘Let us not be waking up that metal monster again. Let it rest safe in its slumber.’

‘My dear mammal.’ Coppertracks stopped his work and swivelled on one of his tracks. ‘That monster is little more than an extra arm for me to plug into my body; it is a drone, a mu-body driven by my id … to all intents and purposes it is me.’

‘Ah, Coppertracks,’ pleaded the commodore, ‘I know your vast intelligence pulls on different bodies like I do a pair of old boots, but that beast you keep in the basement is possessed. It is as wicked as a sand demon.’

‘The Steamo Loas only rode it the once and they could have picked any of my bodies,’ said Coppertracks. He turned to Nickleby. ‘Fire up its boiler for me, Silas softbody. I shall stand sentry outside Tock House tonight.’

Two levels of chambers and junk rooms lay underneath the tower of Tock House. Molly and Nickleby navigated a narrow trail through piled curios and junk. There were globes of the world, many of the continents left a speculative solid yellow for the unknown, oil portraits of Guardians and guild officials, orreries of the twenty planets of the solar system, their celestial motion stilled by rusty clockwork; and more recent additions to the junk — piled daguerreotype prints taken by a real-box.

Unlike the staid upright family shots that graced the windows of fashionable real-box artists, these monochrome prints were of Middlesteel itself. Nagcross Bridge at sunrise, a few lonely milk carts setting out from their depot, the masts of wherries sailing the Gambleflowers rising like trees beyond. The massive bell house of Brute Julius rising out of the House of Guardians, ready to ring each afternoon as parliament began sitting. A child at Cradledon aerostat field, her face wide in wonder at the merchant marine airships poised in a long line down the horizon. Behind the daguerreotype images stood a real-box on its tripod, the sad nose of the lens pointed at the dusty flagstones.

Nickleby saw Molly looking at the card-mounted images. ‘They are mine, Molly.’

‘I haven’t seen anything like them,’ said Molly. ‘You could make a living just selling them.’

‘I did once,’ said the pensman. ‘As well as writing for TheIllustrated, I used to take real-box pictures for the newspapers.’

‘Used to? What happened?’

‘A mixture of the personal and the practical, Molly. I ran out of images I wanted to capture, and then the illustrators’ combination lobbied parliament to ban the use of daguerreotypes in printed publications. They said the images could be used in a bawdy and lewd manner and pointed to the sleazier end of Dock Street to make their point. These days the only place I could sell my real-box work would be to the underground press — Carlist flysheets, political pamphlets and issues of Damsons’ Relish.’

Molly could tell there was something more that Nickleby was not telling her, but they were soon at the end of the chamber and into a second hall, this one filled with furniture and curios left by a previous owner; wooden mannequins wearing armour from foreign lands and earlier times.

Small wonder the present owners had hidden the figures out of sight; it was as if Molly and the pensman stood surrounded by a legion of spectres. There was plate armour from the old royalist army, spiked steel chest-pieces and beaked helmets with holes on either side for rubber gas-mask tubes long since rotted away. There were Cassarabian sand rider uniforms — brittle leather skins with more lace ties than a ball gown and head masks of thin metal gauze capable of filtering a hundred-mile-an-hour desert storm. There were quilted gutta-percha guardsmen jackets from Catosia, ridiculously oversized to accommodate the shine-swelled muscles of their pectorals and latissimus dorsi.

In between the animal skins of a couple of Liongeli tribesmen stood what Molly had first taken for powered duelling armour — towering above its companions — but as Nickleby approached it, Molly realized that there was no manikin underneath. This was one of Coppertracks’ spare bodies, the steamman’s dark alter ego that had sent the commodore scurrying for the comfort of the pantry. Nickleby slid a couple of bricks of compressed high-grade coke into the steamman’s armoured furnace loader and flicked the ignition switch on the oil reservoir.

With a rattle of its iron arms the body started to wake. Four centaur-like legs began to piston the steamman higher, the creature turning its square head to scan them.

‘Aliquot, can you hear me?’ asked Nickleby.

‘Yes,’ answered the metal centaur. Filtered through the voicebox of this brute, Coppertracks’ consciousness had none of the scholarly inflexions or distracted airs of the slipthinker Molly had met in the tower above. This was a killing machine and nothing else. Two manipulator arms flexed their metal fingers, while above, two long fighting arms — segmented javelins — swung in a testing arc.

‘Upstairs, then,’ said Nickleby.

‘Patrol, guard, protect,’ said the steamman.

‘Sharparms is a poor conversationalist,’ said Nickleby to Molly. ‘King Steam would not offend the knights steammen by giving the slipthinkers mu-bodies with minds capable of strategy and war arts — it is Coppertracks’ job to supply the brains.’

‘Mister Black doesn’t like him,’ said Molly.

‘Submariners are a superstitious lot,’ said Nickleby. ‘The commodore had a bit of a fright when one of the Loas possessed Sharparms on the Isla Needless. But whether being ridden by the spirits or not, you can rely on Coppertracks’ bodies to keep us safe at Tock House.’

Molly’s sleep was not made any easier by the lush depths of her mattress or the round goose-feather pillows scattered across the four-poster bed. Every time she started to fall asleep she woke up with a start, convinced someone was in the room with her. Now it was night she could hear the mechanism of the clock two storeys above, the slow processions of the hands, and every couple of minutes a thud and a clack interrupting the gargle of the tower’s water and heating pipes. Cursing herself for a fool, she kicked the blanket off her body and dipped her feet down for her shoes.

There was a bathroom at the end of the corridor; perhaps a glass of water would settle her insomnia. She needed no lantern; the corridor was fitted with miniature chandelier clusters, pressure fed with slipsharp oil and ignited by a clockwork timer. The whole house seemed a faddish monument to machine-time, the clock tower imposing its artificial order on the passage of the day, splitting it neatly into minutes and hours — switching the lights on for darkness and dimming them for dawn.

Yawning, Molly turned and saw a figure at the end of the corridor — it looked like a child. But … someone familiar. Her heart turned cold. She did know her. She was the girl from Silver Onestack’s visions, painted by the steamman across hundreds of canvas illustrations. Had the girl disappeared from Onestack’s dreams when Molly fixed the steamman’s broken vision plate? Was she looking for a new host to haunt?

A keening moan sounded and it took every ounce of courage Molly possessed not to break and flee screaming. The girl pointed out of the window into the night beyond — the moaning was coming from the garden, not the girl at all. A cough from one of the bedrooms distracted Molly for a second; someone else was waking up in the house. Molly glanced back. The apparition had vanished. Walking forward, she pressed her face against the cold glass, staring down onto the lawn.

Sharparms was standing sentry like a stone lion in front of Tock House, while stumbling across the grass was Nickleby. The pensman was the source of the animal-like cry, his arms raised in supplication to the heavens. In his right hand he held a crystal glass hookah, mumbleweed smoke rising from its mouth pipe like green mist into the cool night air. Following in his wake were two of Coppertracks’ iron goblins, the drones trying to convince the journalist to return to the warmth of the house, dragging and clutching at his bed robes.

A hand rested itself on Molly’s shoulder and she yelped, jumping back.

‘Molly, it is only me,’ said the commodore. ‘So you’ve been woken up by the noise too.’

‘What’s going on down there? Silas is dancing around on the grass, half out of his mind by the looks of it.’

‘Leaafed again. That’s too bad, poor Silas. A little puff of the weed can settle a person down for the night and ward off bad dreams, but he smokes too blessed much, reaching for oblivion in the southern fashion.’

Nickleby had half collapsed on the grass and Coppertracks’ diminutive servants were trying to prop him up, their birdlike iron feet trampling the liquid the hookah had spilled across the lawn. In his horseless carriage, on the pocket aerostat, Molly suddenly realized that the pensman had never seemed to be too far away from his mumbleweed pipe.

‘Leaafed for a ha’penny, dead leaafed for two,’ said Molly, repeating the old jinn-house adage.

‘Ah, Molly,’ said Black. ‘You don’t know what that man has seen. The horrors.’

‘You mean the Pitt Street slayings?’

‘Not them, lass, though I don’t doubt that would turn a person’s stomach, those poor dead wretches — no, I mean his days in the war.’

‘Against Quatershift?’ said Molly. ‘He said he’d been in the navy, but flying an ink blotter — I thought he was writing propaganda for Greenhall or something.’

‘He was in the sharp crew, Molly. All the clever-clever types from the eight great universities, the order, the military. Strategy, mind games and black sorcery. Silas was one of the best, a real-box master and a creative thinker. They were running some grand scams, so they were — cracking Commonshare codes with the great machines at Greenhall, writing forged letters to families back in Quatershift from prisoners that had died at the front. Telling the shifties how well they were being treated in Jackals, what beasts the Committee’s officers were — all the atrocities they were forced to commit. Silas was as good at faking daguerreotypes as he was at taking real-box pictures in the first place.

‘The sharp crew would fake daguerreotypes of the First Committee throwing banquets with naked bawdy girls on the table as dessert, Dock Street would print them up, and then our aerostats would drop them on the front line. Imagine, lass, if you were a Carlist soldier stuck in the mud at Drinnais while you knew your family were half-starving back in the fields, then you got to see your leaders living high on the hog and pouring wine down each other’s naked throats. There wasn’t much fight left in the conscript regiments of their brigades by the time the sharp crew had their mortal fun with them.’

Out on the lawn Nickleby had fallen flat on the grass in front of the sphinx-like steamman sentry; Coppertracks’ mu-bodies had no trouble loading his weeping form onto their shoulders and climbing the steps back to the house.

‘You should hide his pipe,’ said Molly.

‘He needs it, lass, to blot out the memories of Reudox.’

‘The city we bombed?’

‘The city we dirt-gassed, Molly. The sharp crew sent Silas out to Reudox with his real-box. After the attack the airship crew went down in masks and lined up all the shiftie bodies, a nice long line of corpses. Not soldiers or mill workers mind, but the ones who would make for a good daguerreotype picture back on the front line. Children in committee-school uniforms, mothers, babies, and old men clinging onto grandmothers, a good long line of mortal innocents. And then the sharp crew took real-box pictures of them for a series of accordion-folded news sheets, the house number and street name where each body had been found printed underneath. We dropped those pictures of the corpses on top of the people’s army and let them pass them to the soldiers who came from Reudox.’

Molly felt sick. ‘We did that to the shifties?’

‘After the navy dropped the pictures on all the main shiftie cities, the Commonshare folded. Despite all their purges, all their secret police, all their informers, the Carlists would have been fed into a Gideon’s Collar if they had let any more of their cities be gassed. The shifties folded and clung to power and poor blessed Silas still tries to smoke away the faces of the dead babies at Reudox.’

‘Have you seen any of them?’ Molly asked. ‘The children I mean. As spectres at Tock House?’

The commodore took a step back. ‘Unquiet spirits, lass? Do not speak of such things. Tock House is big enough for us, but not for all the poor ghosts of Reudox. Haven’t we suffered enough in this life without having to comfort the poor souls denied passage along the Circle?’

‘You haven’t seen a ghost in these corridors?’

‘There may be ghosts here, lass, but they keep to themselves — and let us leave it at that. Come, Molly, let’s help Aliquot Coppertracks put Silas back to bed and then we will cure our unsettled rest with a warm glass of mulled wine and a slice or two of ham.’

Molly let the commodore lead her downstairs, but she felt a cold shiver as she stepped through the spot where the spectral girl had been standing. She had hoped Tock House was going to be a sanctuary from the people who wanted her dead, but with Silver Onestack’s vision following her around and her self-professed protector a half-insane leaafer, the protection of The Middlesteel Illustrated and its staff was starting to look distinctly flimsy.