The Court of the Air

Chapter Nineteen

They’re coming,’ shouted Nickleby from the window. A volley of silenced shots crackled off the thick walls of Tock House. Molly triggered her rifle and the recoil of the butt smashed painfully against her shoulder. She did not see where her shot landed — it was dark outside and the toppers were wearing uniforms blacker than a stack cleaner’s breeches.

‘Lean hard into the rifle, lass,’ said the commodore. ‘Don’t give it any room to dance about on you now.’

He rested his monstrous cannon on the open windowsill and fired it down into the grounds, all eight barrels spreading chaos below. Coppertracks’ drones ran behind them, taking discharged rifles, breaking them and emptying the shattered crystal charges into stone buckets. One of the mu-bodies passed a reloaded rifle to Molly. Coppertracks stood obscured behind the workbench and the blood machine, lying silent now the servants of his id were helping repel the attack.

‘Aliquot,’ called the commodore. ‘Will you busy yourself over here, we’re fighting for our blessed lives.’

Coppertracks did not reply, but from outside the night was filled with screams. Sharparms was galloping through the darkness spearing toppers with his piston arms. He had waited hidden in the tree line until the assault force had gathered in strength; now he was rampaging through the grounds like the dark conscience of the slipthinker, leaving murder and trampled softbodies in his wake.

‘You beautiful, frightful thing,’ called the commodore. ‘But I’m still glad we’ve four thick walls between us and you.’

As the toppers tried to assemble to meet the threat Sharparms would crash through the wood, the ghostly chatter of his spear arms moving in and out before he vanished into the tree line, reappearing in their midst from another angle.

Molly, Nickleby and the commodore poured shots down into the distracted assault, spinning bodies around to fall onto the gravel and the carefully tended flowerbeds. Coppertracks came up behind Molly and ushered her to the side as he passed beakers of red fizzing liquid to his mu-bodies. They hurled the chemicals out of the tower’s broken clock face, raining them down onto a cluster of toppers who were hefting a battering ram with a blow-barrel sap-filled head towards Tock House’s door. Jelly-like fire spread across the party, flames spilling out into the bushes and trees to the side of the coach house.

‘Dear Circle, Aliquot,’ said Nickleby. ‘Careful with my horseless.’

As Sharparms impaled two toppers, one on either arm, a figure stepped out of the bushes behind the steamman, spinning a three-sphere bolas around his head. Unlike the others he was not dressed in black — he looked more like he had been diverted from a dinner engagement at one of the chandelier-lit palaces of food along Goldhair Park. Light from Coppertracks’ chemical fire briefly illuminated his face. Molly sucked in her breath. It was him! The old devil from the bawdyhouse, the same jigger who had killed Slowcogs and Silver Onestack. Count Vauxtion. He was like some demon from a Spring-heeled Jack penny ballad. Every time she thought she had escaped him and slunk away into anonymity, he appeared like the calm eye in a cyclone of death.

The count’s bolas twisted in slow motion, wrapping itself around Sharparms’ hind legs — the steamman dropped the two dead toppers off his spear arms, his helmet-like head turning towards the source of the threat. From the woods one of Coppertracks’ other mu-bodies raced towards the warrior — he had nearly reached Sharparms when the explosion leapt out, blowing the diminutive drone back across the gravel. In the clearing smoke Molly saw that both of the steamman’s rear legs had been vaporized. Sharparms was trying to use his front two legs to scrabble forward, but the vengeful assassins were on top of him, opening his frayed armour with harpoon-like weapons.

Behind Molly, Coppertracks’ body tossed on top of his tracks, moaning as the pain of his warrior drone’s death overwhelmed him. Nickleby and the commodore emptied their rifles into the fray, but it was too late. Tock House’s steamman guardian lay deactivate in a pool of dark oil, his life force spilled in the warm summer night.

‘They’re withdrawing,’ shouted Molly. It was true, down below the toppers were disappearing back into the trees.

‘No, lass,’ said Commodore Black. ‘The black-hearted devils know we are on our last legs now. They’re regrouping.’

True to the submariner’s prediction the toppers came back out a few minutes later, odd guns that looked like broomsticks with kegs on their tips strapped to their bodies.

Molly stared. ‘What are those things?’

‘Get down Molly.’ Nickleby pushed her to the floor as one of the kegs fireworked off its broom and crashed through the shattered clockface. It was pierced with pepper-holes and spun across the floor, filling the chamber with smoke.

‘Aliquot,’ yelled Nickleby, ‘get the girl out of here.’

‘My vision glass is impaired,’ called the steamman. ‘Find my nearest mu-body.’

More of the wooden kegs clattered across the chamber, spinning as gas streamed out. Black was coughing an obscenity, but Molly could not even see him now in the smog. It smelt sickly sweet and stung at her eyes like vinegar — inhaling it was like trying to breathe cotton wool, her throat hacking as her lungs tried to separate air from the foul viscous cloud.

Crawling across the floor, breathing nails, she could not see Nickleby or any of her other friends — her tear-eyed vision was down to a couple of inches inside the mustard thick haze. An explosion shook the tower, followed by a clang as the metal shield door collapsed back with all the weight of a dying slipsharp. Molly’s shaking body was enveloped by darkness long before the first grappling hook slashed into the metal frame of the clock face.

‘What was in the blanket he gave you?’ asked Harry Stave.

‘I haven’t had the chance to look yet,’ said Oliver. ‘He said it was a gift. Something he didn’t get to use much anymore.’

‘He’d spend his time more profitably trying to find the miner we’re looking for,’ said Harry. ‘The old man said he knew the son — how hard can it be to track down a single grasper?’

The reverend appeared at the bottom of the stairs. ‘That depends on how hard the grasper in question is trying not to be found, Harold.’

‘Good to see your hearing isn’t going yet, old man.’

‘My sense of hospitality is wearing powerful thin though. So it’s lucky for both of us that your miner has just walked into the church. He’s waiting out the back with your steamman friend — but ’ware how you tread, this pilgrim is more than a little skittish.’

‘About time,’ said Harry.

‘Come on Harry, he’s just an old man,’ said Oliver. ‘I think he believes he’s going to move along the Circle soon.’

‘He might be right,’ said Harry. ‘One way or another.’

In the church hospice the grasper stood nervously, his boots twitching on the floor, although he became slightly calmer when he saw the reverend return.

‘This is Mabvoy,’ said the reverend. ‘His father was the combination man you described.’

‘Sit down my friend,’ said Harry. ‘We’re on the same side. The people who murdered your father have been doing their best to kill us off, too.’

‘Well pardon me if I don’t find that reassuring,’ said the grasper. ‘I only came here because with the reverend’s friends asking around town after me, it was only going to be a matter of time before word got back to them that you were looking for me. After that, I’d be as dead as my father … and so would you.’

‘Your father came to visit us in Hundred Locks,’ said Oliver.

‘You?’ The grasper looked at Oliver as if he was seeing him in the room for the first time.

‘My uncle,’ said Oliver. ‘He came to visit my Uncle Titus.’

‘Ah. Yes, he went north a couple of times — said he was telling someone about the problems at the mines. I thought it might be a Greenhall man.’

‘He didn’t want to tell the authorities here?’ asked Harry.

‘There’s them that did,’ said the grasper. ‘And them that did weren’t seen again. Nothing happens at Shadowclock without a nod from the governor. Everyone knows that. You might as well complain to the highwaymen about the mail coach being robbed. One of the traders that came here told my father that he knew someone who could sort the problems out. It cost him his life.’

‘It cost my uncle his life, too,’ said Oliver. ‘Your killers turned up at Seventy Star Hall and finished us all off. It wasn’t much of an existence, but it was mine.’

‘Sorry for your family,’ said the grasper. He sounded like he meant it.

Harry checked the window. Steamswipe was standing sentry at the wall, his vision plate tracking the workers and families walking up and down the street. Watching for people who might be loitering, repeating their route. Lord Wireburn hung on a clip on his flank, a brooding black presence waiting for murder.

‘Tell me about the problems,’ said Harry.

The grasper laughed, but there was no humour in it. ‘You got all day? It started two or three years ago. There was a wave of young blood coming up through the mining combination. Radicals. Said we were getting the shaft, not the silver mine from the masters. Wanted to demand more money — all the usual things.’

‘Your father was high in the warren.’

‘He was on the combination committee,’ said the grasper. ‘They opposed the radicals at first — there was no respect for the elders being shown — that’s not the way we do things. But then the radicals bypassed the committee and went direct to the governor, demanded the reforms — and he gave in. Just like that. No withdrawal of labour, no work to rule. He just said yes, as meek as you please.’

Stave made a sound at the back of his throat. Disbelief, but it came out as half a growl.

‘I see you know how it works,’ said the grasper. ‘There’s not a penny we earn that hasn’t been sweated and fought out of the masters’ pockets. There’s not a public bath in Shadowclock that hasn’t been built on the back of an unlawful public assembly and disorder. But they just ask and the governor gives the radicals it all.’

‘That must have caused quite a stir,’ said Harry.

‘It finished the old committee,’ said the grasper. ‘After that there was no stopping the radicals. They took over the combination. Strutted around the city like the lords of the town.’

‘So how come I don’t see a sea of smiling faces coming off each shift down in the streets?’ asked Harry.

‘Oh, we still get the money,’ said the grasper. ‘But we get a lot more than that too. Miners started disappearing. Just a few at first, but the ones who vanished were the master guildsmen. Tunnellers, frame layers, engineers. The best the city had. Without them looking after things the gas mines got unsafe powerful fast.’ The grasper pulled his shirt open, showing them the burns across his leathery fur. ‘Gas flare — killed four of my team. In the old days that kind of seepage would have been detected, sealed and drained. Now, there’s barely a worker down the tunnels who knows one end of a cavity-cutter tube from another. The new committee abolished the apprenticeship system — said it encouraged inequitable caste distinctions — now there’s so many workers vanished from the city that they’re throwing pups down the pits.’

‘But that’s got to have hit your production quotas,’ said Harry. ‘The House of Guardians may not care about rock falls in the tunnels, but by the Circle, they do care about the supply of celgas.’

‘I heard the governor has been making up the shortfall by running down the reserves,’ said the grasper. ‘The governor and the combination are working together. You open your mouth to complain and if the combination hands don’t beat you along the Circle, the redcoats will pull you from your bed at night and you’ll never be seen again.’

‘Where are the miners who disappear being taken to?’ asked Oliver.

‘I bloody well know where the troublemakers go,’ said the grasper. ‘I went to one of the caverns the combination has declared out of bounds — there’s bodies down there, rotting corpses piled as high as houses. Probably my father too if I had the heart to look.’

Oliver felt sick to the stomach. People treated like the scraps from a cleared table, their bodies left to decompose underground without a Circlist burial.

Harry’s eyes narrowed. ‘Just the troublemakers?’

The grasper nodded. ‘The workers are taken away. My sister clerks on the hill and even she doesn’t know where they’re being taken. They’ve been told some story about another gas mine that’s been discovered and must be kept secret for the state, but that’s tunnel-mule manure. Everyone knows celgas is only found underneath Shadowclock.’

‘If there is another source of celgas,’ said Harry, ‘it sure as damn isn’t being worked with miners from Shadowclock, old stick. What in the name of the Circle is going on here? None of this makes any sense.’

‘Maybe there is another celgas mine, Harry,’ said Oliver. ‘Isn’t that a secret worth killing Uncle Titus for?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Harry. ‘People have killed for a lot less.’ But the wolftaker did not sound convinced; he looked at Steamswipe, still standing sentry by the window. ‘But I don’t think that King Steam is the sort to get all fierced up by a fortune in gas, not even if it had been found squarely underneath the peaks of the Mechancian Spine.

Oliver rubbed his eyes; they always seemed to be full of grit since they had come to Shadowclock. A fortune worth killing for — but Harry was right, the riches of a fresh gas strike might spark the avarice of the race of man, but it wasn’t enough to vex the Lady of the Lights or produce the grim predictions of King Steam. Jackals was in danger, but the nature of their enemy seemed as elusive as ever.

‘Can your sister find out when the authorities intend to ship the next crew of pressed miners out of the city?’ Harry asked the grasper.

‘I don’t want anything to do with you,’ said the grasper. ‘Just one look at you three maniacs and I know you’re trouble. I’m hiding for my life here — the only thing I need to do in Shadowclock is disappear before someone disappears me.’

‘Think of your father,’ growled Oliver. ‘He cared enough about what happened to his people to do something about it.’

The grasper shivered in his chair. ‘I’m frightened.’

‘I know what that feels like,’ said Oliver. ‘I’ve been running for my life every day since I left my home in Hundred Locks. But the people who are after you are not going to forget about you. Wherever you hide, you’re going to be going to sleep every night wondering whether you’ll wake up with a knife at your throat — or not wake up at all. You don’t want to live life like that. It’s like dying every day. Think about your father at the bottom of that pile of corpses. You want to pay them back for that? Give them something else to think about … give them us.’

‘Alright,’ the grasper crumbled. ‘If she can find out when the next aerostat leaves I’ll give you the details. It may be a few days. There’s not many left here in the trade now worthy of the name brother — the mines are scraping the bottom of the barrel.’

‘We’ll be here,’ said Oliver.

‘Sharply done, Oliver,’ said Harry, after the grasper had gone.

‘He just needed some fire in his belly,’ said Oliver. ‘You could see the fear in his eyes.’

Harry looked at Oliver. There was something different about the young man he could not quite put his finger on.

‘You intend to follow the aerostat back to its home,’ said Steamswipe.

‘That I do not,’ replied Harry. ‘I intend to stow away on the bloody thing. I spent most of my life arranging for contraband to be sneaked on and off RAN vessels. If I can’t get us onto the governor’s stat I don’t deserve to be hanged as a thief.’

‘Then I believe we are as good as on board,’ said Steamswipe.

Oliver tossed and turned in the back room of the church. Since the Whisperer had stopped his nighttime visitations, Oliver’s dreams had become disjointed and jumbled. Faint, fading things that he woke up struggling even to recall. To make matters worse the whistles and hisses from the mines carried on the wind at night, making it hard to drift off. He was used to the rural stillness of Hundred Locks. Oliver could sleep through a storm blown off the dike wall, but not the clatter of miners’ boots as they trampled back from their midnight shift.

He was running through the woods behind Seventy Star Hall, killers from the police and the Court of the Air in pursuit. He could hear Pullinger shouting behind him, promising him leniency if he only turned himself in. Oliver’s head was burning, a band of pain constricting tighter and tighter. Please let me live, please let me live, the plea turned over in his mind. As he fled other dreams seemed to mingle with his desperate scrabble to escape — could you have dreams within a dream? — flashing hooves, a black horse slipping through the night with eyes burning demon-bright. Soldiers stood in his way but the horse and rider rode them down, screams as he smashed through a window, standing on top of a roof as thunder and lightning wrapped around his body like a nimbus.

Then he was back in the woods behind his home and the thunder had followed him from the other dream — and the thunder became laughter, deep and hideous, as if every tree in the forest stood possessed by devils. But the laughter was coming from his throat, from him … two redcoats emerged from the night and still laughing he broke the first soldier’s neck, then grabbed the second man’s rifle and rolled back, spinning the redcoat over his head. He turned the rifle around and bayoneted the soldier on the grass. Other soldiers came, but seeing Oliver laughing in the clearing they fled. His shadow moved around him like a cloak — like something alive, stirring to his whim.

‘Here’s my neck,’ Oliver yelled at the retreating soldiers. ‘Here is my neck. Waiting for the worldsingers’ scaffold, waiting for the caliph’s hunting cats, waiting for the Court’s justice. But who is to take it?’

He could see them, feel them. Every wicked intention, every sin, little bundles of malevolent sparks fleeing into the darkness, trying so hard to escape, but calling to be snuffed out as they fled.

Where there is evil, the trees whispered.

‘Where there is evil,’ Oliver repeated like an oath.

He is called.

‘He is called.’ The pain in his skull intensified and he dropped to the ground, clawing at his burning forehead.

Darkness is your cloak. Fear is your ally. Wickedness is your manna.

Oliver looked around the glade, the mist of pain vanishing, then he filled the forest with his terrible new laughter.

‘I ride at night.’

‘Oliver,’ Harry shook him awake.

‘I hear the noise,’ said Oliver, half dazed. It took him a moment to realize where he was; perhaps even who he was.

Outside in the street a clatter of marching echoed down the soot-stained cobbles. People from the city were spilling out into the morning to see the sight.

The reverend came into the room and peered out of the window. ‘Steammen — an army of them.’

It was true. Outside the church an army of metal creatures stomped in perfect unison, three ranks deep, their boilers pouring dirty black smoke into the air.

‘They are not of the people,’ said Steamswipe, his fierce vision plate scanning the regiment of marching things. ‘They are golem, the clumsy manufacturings of your softbody mechomancers, although I do not doubt the corpses of many of the people informed their architecture.’

Oliver looked closer and saw that Steamswipe was correct. There was none of the uniqueness, none of the life of the citizens of the Steammen Free State in their design. They were peas in a pod, a shambling army of automated undead, transaction engine drums turning in their chests, clumsy welds and rivets sealing their bodies. The fad for steammen produced by companies like Doyce and Clennam had faded decades ago, after the clumsy metal butlers had shown a tendency to pour boiling soup on dinner guests, set fire to drawing rooms and trample over family pets and children. Even the automatics from the workshops of the Catosian League could not begin to approach the simplest of King Steam’s subjects. These new creatures were primitive, but still a cut above the servants that had rolled out of Clennam’s Middlesteel mills — progress of a sort.

‘There’s something wrong with them,’ said Oliver.

‘Everything about them is wrong. They are a violation of the life metal,’ said Steamswipe. ‘A sacrilegious affront by you damn softbodies cast in mockery of our perfection.’

At the knight’s side Lord Wireburn rumbled from his holster, ‘They must be destroyed.’

‘Violation they may be,’ said Harry. ‘But I would say that Shadowclock has solved its labour shortage.’

‘No,’ said Oliver. ‘Can’t you feel it? There are souls inside those things, pieces of human flesh trapped inside the metal. Animals too in some of them. The brains, the hearts of birds and swine. It’s hideous.’

Harry stared down at the legion of golems shaking the windowsill. In the street the families of miners stood and gawked at the sight, children running behind the primitive things as if the coronation carnivals had started early. ‘A fusion of animal and steamman? Damn but I wouldn’t want some mechomancer stuffing my liver inside one of those things.’

Lord Wireburn seethed. ‘Nor would our people want your frail meat cooking over our soul boards. This is dark sorcery indeed.’

‘Keeper of the Eternal Flame,’ said Steamswipe, ‘have you heard of such a foul practice before?’

‘In ancient times such monstrosities existed,’ spat the weapon. ‘They were known as metal-fleshers. Fusions of meat and steamman creeping over the ice sheets to murder each other for parts, blood to drink, bones to consume. But they were self-organizing, not like these uniform things, so obviously milled by the race of man.’

Behind them the preacher sat down laughing and lit a pipe.

‘What’s so funny, old man?’ asked Harry.

‘Harold, I am only laughing so I don’t cry. Just when you get to an age when you think you’ve seen every horror, every pain we’re capable of inflicting on each other, along comes something to shock you out of your dotage. Such baleful ingenu ity. You think those things need sleep? Or rest breaks? Gas flares won’t slow them down and if there’s a cave-in, by the Circle, you can just leave them under the rubble, they’d probably rather die anyway.’

‘Shut up, old man,’ shouted Harry. ‘Get the word to the grasper. There’s going to be a shipment of miners out of Shadowclock in the next few nights. The people those things are replacing. I need to know when.’

‘Who lit a fire under your tail, Harold?’

‘It’s the end game, preacher. If the governor is using those things in the mines he has gone well beyond caring if word leaks back to the House of Guardians about the state of affairs in Shadowclock. Why do you think that would be?’

The preacher stood up. ‘Because fairly soon it won’t matter whether it does or not.’

Down below the sea of clumsy steammen-people hybrids continued to flow past the church.

‘It matters to me,’ whispered Oliver.

In the Court of the Air’s monitorarium, Surveillant Seven’s telescope clacked as it swung a degree to the left. A skrayper had momentarily floated into the surveillant’s field of vision, blocking her view. Down in the troposphere the massive balloon-like creature was being pursued by a hunt of lash-lites, a dozen of the leathery-winged lizard people riding the thin atmosphere. They were climbing for height, trying to avoid the clawed tentacles dangling underneath the skrayper. There seemed to be a lot of lashlite hunts going on at the moment. Surveillant Seven had counted at least five in the last week.

Admittedly she had been working longer than anyone else realized — her monitorarium logs doctored between shifts to make it look like she had been taking her restoration cycle breaks. Most surveillants could last a week or two without sleep — she had done her first four days without even sipping at the potions in her drinking tube; just using the Court’s worldsinger techniques. If she had joined the order on the ground she would have made them come up with a new tattoo scheme to accommodate the number of flowers they would have had to etch on her forehead.

It was no accident they had chosen her for this duty. She was the best of the best, better perhaps than even her furtive masters realized. She put aside the temptation to watch the lashlites at play and dialled up the power of the telescope, the rubber of the viewing hood disconcertingly cold in the unheated monitorarium. There it was! Exactly what she thought she had glimpsed in her wide sweep before the skrayper had blocked the sight.

A little green pinprick in the night. Increase the resolution again, wait for the Court’s transaction engine to catch up with the focus. A pile of powder burning in the darkness, giving off a queer green energy that nearly scorched her eyes. Before the Court’s training she could have had her boots standing in that fiery powder and she would not have noticed it burning. Now, at this resolution, it was like staring into the face of the sun.

She noted the location. A church roof in Shadowclock. Her masters would be pleased — although this was one report that would not be passed through the official channel of the monitors. Her testimony would be given verbally, in some distant corner of the Court; a secret within a secret. The runaway wolftaker had been rumbled. The dangerous, disreputable Harry Stave was being tracked once more and this time the devious jigger would not slip away from her scope.

Prince Alpheus looked at the doctor. Even to his unseasoned eye the man did not seem worthy of the low standard of the Middlesteel College of Surgeons; his hands were shaking so badly that he could barely prepare the syringe.

‘If this is a show of concern for my health,’ said Prince Alpheus, ‘it’s rather late.’

Flare watched the greedy eyes of the two Greenhall functionaries who had accompanied the doctor to the palace. They stood like vampires waiting for the vial of royal blood to be handed over.

‘It is a security issue,’ said the Captain of the Special Guard. ‘They want to make sure you have the markers of the house royal in your blood.’

‘Given they bred me like a damn spaniel I would think that wasn’t in doubt.’

‘His Highness is most probably unaware of the Prince Silvar affair,’ said one of the Greenhall mandarins. ‘Where three royal guardsmen from Quatershift tried to swap the heir-apparent with a doppelganger supplied by the caliphs. A failed attempt to create a monarchy in exile and destabilize parliament. That was before the shifties had their own revolution of course.’

‘But of course,’ said the prince. ‘I suppose I can only guess at the warmth of the welcome the Commonshare would extend to me today. But Hoggstone can count his lucky stars, because my unlucky ones have not yet managed to allow me to slip his choke-chain. It is the genuine article you will be dragging through the towns and shires of Jackals.’

‘We all but serve,’ said the official.

‘Yes, but some of you get to keep your arms attached to your body while doing it.’

The doctor withdrew the syringe from the prince’s arm and handed the crimson-filled vial to the officials. They slipped it inside a velvet-lined case and then sealed the container shut by pressing Greenhall’s arms deep into a bead of hot wax.

‘Thank you for your time,’ said the more senior functionary, placing the box under his arm. ‘Your ratified certificate of royal breeding will be presented to the surgeon before the coronation ceremony culminates in Parliament Square. A quick blood machine test will be repeated there to verify your identity.’

‘I may go now?’ said the prince.

‘Of course,’ said the official. ‘I am sure you have a full diary.’

‘Yes indeed,’ said the prince. ‘It’s a constant effort to fit in all the feasts, dedications and bridge openings in between the stonings.’

‘We all but serve,’ the two officials chorused, bowed towards Captain Flare and the Special Guardsmen, and departed.

Flare watched Prince Alpheus leave after the two functionaries had been escorted from the palace. Hardfall moved closer to Flare. It was an oddly intimate gesture, but the Special Guardswoman was wary in case the order was surreptitiously listening in to their conversation in the chamber. Their worldsinger minders had become skittish in the last few days, almost as if they suspected that the normal order of things was not being followed; they would be right of course — but not for any reason they could guess at.

‘Greenhall will find out,’ said Hardfall. ‘After they run the blood machine test.’

‘They may not notice,’ replied Captain Flare. ‘They may not even care if they do. Half a royal is better than picking some non-entity from the royal breeding house to be king. The penny sheets are too used to Alpheus as prince. His face is familiar to the voters.’

‘It’s the other half of our young princeling that worries me,’ said Hardfall, brushing her cape back. Her pistol rode high on her hip, slung provocatively. Not that she needed it with her fey gifts.

‘The other half can’t be traced back to me,’ said Flare. ‘Only the mist can make us feybreed — there are no markers in the blood, no gifts that can be passed to our children. If we could breed pure and fey, we would have freed ourselves centuries ago.’

‘Yes, I suppose we would have,’ said Hardfall. ‘And if our blood ran mist-true the order’s fey-finders would have noticed years ago that the prince is your son, not King Julius’s.’

‘Alpheus is a hamblin,’ said Flare. ‘Whatever else he is, he is normal.’

‘For a royal,’ said Hardfall. ‘But then haven’t we all been marked by fate? You will tell him, when all this is over?’

‘He’ll find out.’

‘He might be more cooperative if he knew now.’

‘Or he might not,’ said Flare. ‘He wants his freedom as much as we want ours. I think we can leave it at that for now.’

‘As you will, my captain,’ said the Special Guardswoman. She watched him leave with sad hungry eyes. ‘As you will.’

It was odd. Now that Oliver was packing his knapsack after a week in Shadowclock’s church, saying goodbye to the preacher was like a leave-taking from his uncle. It was as if some link existed between them — far more than a few days’ hospitality coerced by the disreputable Stave’s blackmail should have warranted. There were still a few workers outside in the street, tending the gas mines even in the small hours of the night. Why not? It was always night in the shafts and channels underground.

‘You don’t need to stay up so late,’ said Oliver. ‘It’s not as if you signed on to help us voluntarily.’

‘I never get tired at night, boy,’ said the reverend. ‘It’s the most peaceful time of the day.’

Oliver checked his canteen for water. ‘I know what you mean.’ And by the Circle, he did know. Last night he had only slept two hours and rather than feeling tired, he felt as though he had rested for a month in one of Middlesteel’s finest hotels. More than that, his bones seemed to vibrate in the sleeping hours, his blood racing to the call of the moon. He ached to go outside and feel the beauty of the darkness on his skin, slip through its cleansing purity. And his dreams — they had become compressed bolts of images, dense memories of past lives — hundreds of them, all different and all the same.

The preacher saw Oliver about to strap the boatman’s gun to the side of the pack and reached out to stop him. ‘It’s time to open that parcel I gave you.’

‘Your book of Circlelaw, it’s over here.’

‘It’s not Circlelaw,’ said the reverend. ‘I still have some use for that.’

Oliver unwrapped the case from the faded old blanket and flipped the box’s double latches. As he pulled up the lid a silver glow illuminated his hands, the lunar light reacting with its contents like alchemy. Inside a brace of identical silver-plated pistols, ivory handled, every inch etched with scenes — eagle wings and duels, warring regiments and the silhouettes of man-beasts. On the ivory of each handle lay the scrimshaw of a lion that looked familiar, very nearly the lion from the crest of Jackals. A more primitive form, though, raw and snarling, not pictured in the gracious repose from the nation’s coat of arms.

‘These were yours?’ asked Oliver.

‘You might say they have been passed down the family.’

There was a double holster in the top of the case, plain black patent leather. The kind that was meant to be shoulder slung and worn concealed under a greatcoat.

‘But then you should leave them to your children,’ protested Oliver. ‘That’s real silver leaf on the metal. They must be worth the contents of a counting-house vault.’

‘A long time ago I had hoped my oldest daughter might be interested in them. But it turned out I was wrong,’ said the reverend.

Oliver pointed to the old bell-barrelled weapon from Loade and Locke. ‘I can just about hit something with that. Surely these are a duellist’s guns, meant for a marksman or an officer in one of the regiments.’

‘Pick them up,’ said the preacher.

Oliver lifted them out of the case — the guns felt warm, comfortable, part of his arm — why had he even entertained any doubts about accepting the gift? They were perfect.

‘It’s strange,’ said Oliver, ‘I-’

‘The trick,’ interrupted the preacher, ‘is to know when to pick them up and when to put them down.’

Oliver’s hands shook after he placed them back in the case, shook the way he had seen ferrymen shake when they had gone into Hundred Locks’ taverns with a thirst that only cheap jinn could quench. He would not reject the gift now. What a fool the preacher’s daughter must have been.

‘I’m putting them down,’ said the preacher, adamantly.

‘I won’t need the boatsman pattern pistol any more,’ said Oliver.

‘No,’ said the reverend. ‘But you should keep the knife.’

‘I don’t remember telling you-’

‘You didn’t have to,’ said the reverend. ‘It’s a good knife. The kind I wish I had owned many years ago.’

Oliver looked out of the window. The call of the night was stronger than ever before. ‘Thank you for everything.’

‘Boy, with that wild blood of yours you may be the best of us.’

‘I should keep the knife in my boot.’

‘That’s what I would do,’ said the preacher.

Downstairs, the hex Harry had traced in the air was fading away. So, it had not been a waste of time listening in on the old goat. What was the reverend playing at? He was up to some mischief, of that much the wolftaker was certain. Up to now the churchman had kept his end of the bargain, staying in retirement and out of the way in the mining city. As the keeper of so many secrets himself, he hated for the old fool to have something over him. That was not the way he intended the great game to be played — if there was skulduggery to be had in Jackals, far better that it be the hand of the disreputable Stave to be found on the tiller.

Without the breezes of the day to carry away the engine smoke, Shadowclock was subject to the same foul-smelling pea soupers as Middlesteel. Thick engine fogs rose up with the night, reducing the full moon to a smudge of silver behind their haze.

Oliver looked down at the cobbles of the steep streets, his boots moving invisibly below the soup, the damp of the cloud making his socks itch. They could hear patrols along the high walls calling out to each other, see the occasional flicker of a bull’s-eye lantern. They were keeping an eye open for night constables or the combination’s bullyboys, but the ruffians were saving their vigilance for the city battlements. For all his large bulk, Steamswipe could move near silently, his helmet-like head swivelling, the grill of his voicebox vibrating as he emitted bursts of sound pitched beyond the human ear. The steamman swore he could navigate the fog that way, pick out the combination enforcers and the governor’s men. He obviously possessed the talent, as he managed to lead them across the maze of tall deserted streets without coming across anyone else, in twisting turns which always led them up the hill, towards the governor’s own aerostat field.

What Oliver did not say to his friends was that he could feel the presence of the enforcers too — could see how well the steamman knight was leading them around the armed patrols. He could feel them all, little candles of wickedness burning in the night. Not just the patrols either — the drunken gang master four streets away beating his wife as she tried to shield their children from his rage; the roof angler who had forced open a skylight and was rummaging around in a darkened room for a key to the locked cabinet, a knife in his belt in case he was disturbed; the governor in his mansion clapping in drunken amusement as his soldiers beat to death one of the miners who had tried to escape the press gang. Each ember of malice smouldering in the darkness.

‘Oliver!’ Harry helped the boy off his knees. ‘Are you ill?’

‘I can feel it, Harry.’

‘Feel what?’

‘The evil. I can feel the evil in them.’

‘You’re sweating like you’ve got the pox,’ said Harry. ‘And talking like you’re trying to scare up a crowd for a seance.’

‘Less noise. We must go on,’ said Steamswipe. ‘This night may be the last aerostat run from Shadowclock with miners.’

‘I’m fine,’ said Oliver. ‘The sweat will pass.’

A row of small lights lit up along the side of Lord Wireburn, holstered on the back of the steamman knight. ‘It is as if the Loas ride you, Oliver softbody. But I detect no presence here, just the press of great events. Curious.’

‘I am here, Keeper of the Eternal Flame,’ said Oliver. ‘Just me. And Steamswipe is right; this is our last chance to hitch a free ride courtesy of the governor. We go now.’

The aerostat field was at the top of the hill, behind the walls of the governor’s mansion. An airship was sitting on the retraction rails in front of a hangar. She was a ship of the merchant marine, no gun ports or fin-bomb hatches to pock her hull. No doubt Thaddius or one of the other boys back at Hundred Locks could reel off her class just from looking at her silhouette. To Oliver she looked just like any of the aerostats that had slid past them in the sky on their journey to Shadowclock. The vessel had been winched in close to the ground, boarding stairs pushed up to her belly gondola.

‘It is too open,’ said Steamswipe pointing to the box lanterns lined up along the hill. ‘Too little cover and too many crew around the hangar.’

Harry rested his spine against the wall. ‘I can fix that. We head for the big expansion engine, port at the nose; I can get us in there. If anyone spots us, you use your voice on them.’

‘My voice?’ said Steamswipe.

‘Don’t play the innocent with me, old steamer. I saw Master Saw ring a bell from the other side of a practice hall using just his voicebox. You can set a wicked old vibration ringing through our blood, I warrant.’

Harry took the knight’s silence for agreement and sat cross-legged, mumbling in the tongue of the worldsingers. As he mumbled the mist swirled around their feet, climbing up the hill and settling over the field. A weather calling. Oliver could feel the tendrils of the worldsong beckoning the fog higher, thicker, the hill thrumming with the power of the land. The fog was so thick already; the currents of earthflow so strong underneath Shadowclock, that the pea souper needed little encouragement to settle higher.

The fey energy inside Oliver bristled at the feel of the world-song. He could see within himself now, as if a veil had been lifted and the complex springs of his own mist-given powers lay visibly unwinding. It was like watching worms burrow through the corpse of someone he had once loved. Too painful to observe, but too gruesome for him to tear his gaze away. They were a part of him, but an alien part — a part that by rights should not be able to occupy this fleshy sack of meat and water and bones, should not be able to walk in this realm of solid geometries and limited dimensions. They churned within him and Oliver could not believe he had not seen them before. Could not believe that he had actually sat opposite worldsinger fey-finders and inquisitors and had the cheek to protest his humanity.

The fog seemed to be thickening about Oliver’s heels faster than the adjacent ground, corkscrewing around his legs — even Harry looked surprised at how quickly the summoning was becoming localized.

‘It’s alright,’ said Oliver. ‘I like the fog.’

‘We have our cover,’ said Steamswipe.

Oliver looked across to the mist-wrapped leviathan of the air. The steamman had not needed to say they also had the element of surprise. Most of the able-bodied workers in Shadowclock were in hiding to avoid being transported on this aerostat. The guards were bargaining on any sane minds avoiding the governor’s mansion and their press gangs. As usual, their path was plunging them headfirst into peril.

Steamswipe took five steps back then ran at the wall, vaulting it with ease. Harry cupped his hand, boosting Oliver up. Once on the top of the wall, Oliver lowered a hand for the disreputable Stave, then the three of them were in the mist. The fog distorted the sounds of the ground crew and their conversations on the other side of the field carried across to the three adventurers as if they stood mere feet away.

‘-ballast is loaded.’

‘-never seen a smog come down like that.’

‘-so he said, talk to the first mate. First mate, says I, it’s him who bleeding needs to talk to me.’

Oliver nearly walked into the propeller. Wrought metal blades and an expansion engine assembly as large as a house, its curved lines had been cast by the airship foundry in the image of a giant lion’s head, cold steel eyes locked forward, teeth snarling. Harry ducked under the propeller and pulled himself inside the metal housing’s mouth, feeding himself to the metal cat.

‘There’s a maintenance hatch in here,’ he whispered.

‘I doubt I will fit my magnificent architecture through it,’ said Steamswipe. ‘I am intended for war, not crawling through the ducts of your flotation vessel like a softbody rodent.’

They waited a couple of minutes and were rewarded by a pop in the aerostat’s rigid envelope, then a hatch was lowered down by a hand crank next to the engine. Inside Harry stood in a chamber piled with barrels of expansion-engine gas, glass-lined wood branded with the silhouette of blow-barrel trees, their vapours safely sealed and stored.

‘The purser would have checked forward storage this morning,’ said Harry, closing the loading ramp behind them. ‘We can clear some of these barrels and make a hiding space in case any of the jack cloudies come in here for fuel during the voyage.’

Oliver opened his pack and checked the food was still there.

‘You won’t need that,’ said Harry. ‘This isn’t a passenger liner, it’s a Guardian Smike-class hauler. She hasn’t got the range to be exploring the lakes of Liongeli, Oliver. However many miners they’re taking out of here, they’re taking them as main cargo. And that means a landing somewhere in Jackals.’

‘Let us make a concealment position among the barrels,’ said Steamswipe. ‘I have a feeling it would be a mistake to discharge the Keeper of the Eternal Flame inside this hold.’

Harry looked at the blow-barrel tree silhouette on the barrels. ‘Very perceptive. And I will forgo my daily pinch of mumbleweed, given how I remember most skippers’ fondness for the strap when they catch a cloudie with a pipe on board.’

Their nest amongst the cargo constructed, the three of them waited an hour before the shouts outside warned them the airship was about to launch. The floor trembled as the vessel was drawn down the launch rail and onto a turntable to match the wind direction. Then the rail claws fell back and Oliver’s stomach dropped as the ship began to lift. It became hard to hear each other talk over the rise and fall of the engine’s noise — their whispers needed to become shouts. They might arrive at their destination deaf, but at least the racket would make it almost impossible for any sailor passing by to hear them moving about in the fuel store.

Shortly they had stopped rising and it became colder on board. The main gondola and crew compartments might have been heated, but now Oliver understood why — be it summer, autumn or spring — the jack cloudies who had landed at Hundred Locks came into town wearing thick woollen jumpers with roll-necks tied around their striped sailor’s vests like belts. Shivering, Oliver and Harry broke open the blanket rolls from their packs and took turns warming their hands on Steamswipe’s boiler stack.

Despite the chill and the din Oliver finally managed to drift off to sleep in the early hours of the morning. Harry opened one of his eyes. The young man was breathing deeply, his breath misting the icy air. Steamswipe and his weapon were in their approximation of sleep too, thoughtflow. Leaning over, Harry eased out the wooden case that had been given to Oliver by the reverend in Shadowclock. Checking the narrow corridor outside their fuel store was empty, Harry made his way through the duralumin-framed passage, canvas spheres of celgas brushing his head where he forgot to duck.

At the end of the gantry he opened the wooden door to the small forward head, a simple affair, little more than a seat with a flap opening out to the sky. The disreputable Stave opened the lid of the case. Both pistols were still inside, glinting malevolently. Even without their finely etched scenes, the ivory handles and precious metal plating, the brace would have raised a sack full of clinking guineas in any gunsmith or pawnshop in Jackals. You did not have to be a sorcerer to feel the press of their song, feel the draw of their wicked spangle. Harry shivered, slapped the lid shut, tossed the case into the head and jerked the flush.

As the flap opened, the case tumbled into the sky and Harry watched it disappear into the clouds. It was an expensive hunch, but it was not as if Oliver could have hit the side of a barn with either of those two marksman’s pieces.

‘Next time, preacher,’ Harry whispered to the clouds, ‘you can save your bloody gift-giving for Midwinter.’

Captain Stone of the RAN Heart of Oak pushed the cutlass hanging from his dress uniform back. The damn thing was always getting under his feet, but it was required dress for tonight. Half the high fleet looked like they had assembled in the ante-room outside the dining gallery of the governor’s mansion — the northern fleet, the eastern fleet, even a few stiff blue trousers adorned with the single yellow stripe of the western fleet. It was one of the captains of the west who moved through the press and approached him. Haredale. They had been midshipmen together on the Skysprite.

Haredale nodded politely. ‘Stone.’

‘Haredale.’ Captain Stone indicated his fellow officer’s hair, shorn to stubble on the side and wedge-high on top. ‘Going native?’

‘It’s all the go in Concorzia,’ said the colonial officer. ‘Half the fleet officers of the west are sporting ’em.’

‘How are affairs abroad?’ asked Stone. ‘I heard there were some tensions — not just among the natives.’

‘The colonials are taking more settlers now, genuine ones as well as the convict labour, heh. They are a damn volatile mob — transportees, the first families and the locals — always scrapping, but nothing the navy can’t control. The shadow of a ship of the line always sends ’em scampering for the woods. How is the fleet of the south? I heard you had some trouble down there recently.’

‘The RAN Bellerophon?’ said Stone ‘Let’s just say there is the story the First Skylord released for the Dock Street pensmen — and there are the rumours from the poor jacks we got back alive. If it was up to me I would close the whole bloody border, but parliament would have every jinn importer in Jackals banging on their door, so that isn’t going to happen. These days it’s rare for us to take a flotilla out without having to chase off some humpy raiding party coming out of the arids and into the uplands.’

Haredale pushed a finger under his high collar and pulled the cloth loose. ‘Which the caliph claims are bandits, of course.’

‘Bandits my rear end,’ said Stone. ‘Too well supplied. Too sophisticated for some tent-dwelling sand shaman. The caliph’s hand is over every raid. Mark my words, it won’t be long until we have half the upland Guardians calling for us to flatten a few palaces in Bladetenbul and give Cassarabia a bloody nose.’

‘As long as it keeps the fleet of the south out of mischief,’ said the colonial captain. ‘You passed the damn order’s tests then?’

‘A greater load of stuff and nonsense I have never had to sit through,’ growled Stone. ‘Half the officers of the blue kicking around the county waiting their turn for a truth hexing. How many feybreed have they turned up in the service? They’re tacking against the wind this time.’

‘Admiralty House should never have agreed,’ said Captain Haredale. ‘And it takes the governor of Shadowclock to throw us a do to send us off now the order has had its pleasure. Have you even seen an admiral or skylord back at the citadel since they ordered the high fleet home?’

‘There’s no danger from the Admiralty Board,’ snorted Stone. ‘Not unless parliament are worried they might prick someone with a quill. They would have better luck having us cleared by an alienist. The Bellerophon’s captain was clearly mad — not a feybreed.’

‘Never liked the man,’ said the colonial officer. ‘Ran an unhappy ship. Too damn keen to resort to the cat, rather than trusting his middies to keep discipline. Not surprised he went out barking.’

‘Still,’ said Stone, ‘dropping fins on Middlesteel. We’re fortunate they haven’t stuck us with worldsinger political officers like the Special Guard.’

‘That would never stand,’ said Haredale. ‘There’s only room for one skipper on a ship. They might as well fit us all with one of those hexed necklaces of theirs and keep us all on a lead.’

At the end of the room two grand doors were swung open by redcoats, revealing a long high table filled with platters of steaming meat and flagons of wine.

‘Winds of Thar, there’s a spread for you,’ said the colonial captain. ‘Best we avail ourselves before we get back to our weevil bread and salt jerky, heh?’

The milling officers of the fleet began to move into the larger chamber, failing to notice the thuggish crop of stubble on the faces of the redcoats flanking the entrance, or their badly buttoned tunics.

At the head of the table the governor waited for the officers to take their seats and then the chubby statesman raised a heavy crystal glass. ‘Officers of the fleet. I know you sailors normally avoid passing through my city walls due to our sad lack of taverns, but as you can see, my staff have been happy to waive the rules for this evening’s entertainment.’

There were some hoots down the table.

‘The results from the order have now been reported to the Admiralty and handed into the House of Guardians — sadly, none of you would make celgas miners and so the fleet has reluctantly decided to keep you on!’

That raised more whoops of merriment.

‘I think that proves what we all knew all along.’ The governor raised a news sheet freshly couriered from the capital. On the front page was an etching of an aerostat captain fainting into the arms of a couple of stripe-shirted aeronauts, an exaggerated figure of a worldsinger thrusting a truth crystal towards the officer and the speech bubble from the sailors bantering: ‘Does the feymist carry the skipper away?’ — ‘No,’ tis the odour of an early election that makes him swoon.’

‘It proves, gentlemen, that one bad apple does not spoil the barrel.’

Now the captains cheered.

‘So, as a small token of recognition for the service you have done protecting Shadowclock, let me thank our neighbours from the citadel and the aerostat fields to the north in a manner befitting as fine a bunch of jack cloudies as ever crewed a stat — with a raised glass of grog. Shadowclock’s celgas may float your vessels — now may our hospitality lift your hearts before you scatter to the four corners of Jackals and her possessions. To the Royal Aerostatical Navy!’

‘To the navy!’ the table chorused.

Seated in the middle of the table, Captain Stone passed Haredale a plate of boiled ham slices. Plenty of honeyed fat, just the way the Jackelians liked it.

‘You not drinking, Stone?’

‘Touch of sand belly,’ said Captain Stone. ‘Ship’s surgeon has me on powders. Just a taste of wine, jinn or blackstrap has me retching like a newborn.’

Filling up on water — the apothecary’s remedy had made him as dry as the skin of a sand nomad’s tent — Stone made his excuses and left in search of the rest room. He cursed his luck; ruing the day he had stepped out of the choking dust and tried that skewered stick of lamb in the shade of the border market.

After his gut had cleared, Stone realized he was sweating. He checked the pocket of his tunic for one of the parcels of powder and swore as he realized he had taken the last one before he left the citadel for the governor’s mansion. A bit of cool evening air then, even if it was the fog-shrouded miasma that hung over the hills of Shadowclock. He slipped out of a door and followed the line of a hedge around to the gardens. When a westerly was blowing strong enough to clear the smoke, the view from the hill was said to be the best in the walled city. Now all he could see was a constellation of yellow lamps twinkling through the evening smog in the streets below.

Captain Stone glanced behind him. That was odd. There seemed to be a lot of movement in the dining room, a whole company of red-coated men moving up and down the table. Surely the main course could not have finished so quickly? When the rigid envelope of an aerostat did not bind them to their duty, the officers of the high fleet could stretch a feast into the small hours of the morning. He moved closer to the window.

Inside was a picture of madness. Bodies were littered across the floor, others hanging stiff in their chairs, a few captains of the line crawling across the floor puking their guts out while their faces turned crimson. Moving methodically through the carnage the redcoats had knives out, pulling officers back and slicing their throats. At the head of the table the lumpen governor was gorging on the food, laughing and banging the table as his staff dispatched the fleet as if it were a line of animals at an abattoir.

It took a few seconds for the reality of the insane situation to penetrate Stone’s consciousness — seconds which stretched like minutes. Then his mind cleared with the first rush of adrenalin and an animal urge for survival. First the captain of the Resolute. Now this lunacy? It seemed that the worldsingers had set their hounds on the wrong trail — they should have left the citadel alone and tried their luck in Shadowclock.

Sliding his dress cutlass clear as he vanished into the garden, Captain Stone said a silent prayer to the souk vendors of Cassarabia. A prayer to a skewer of meat chunks of dubious provenance that had saved his life.

Oliver woke up early. They were sinking and the air was getting warmer. The rise and fall of the expansion engine had changed pitch too. Steamswipe’s unblinking visor met his gaze. He had Lord Wireburn unholstered. Harry was propped up against a barrel of expansion engine gas.

‘We’re landing?’ Oliver said over the racket of the engine.

‹We are,› Harry replied using his mind voice. ‹About thirty miles east of Middlesteel. In Middlemarsh Forest unless I am mistaken.›

‘How do you know?’

Harry flipped open a compass. ‹Destination, bearing and average speed of a fully laden aerostat.›

The engines cut off and for the first time in an age Oliver could hear silence as the vessel hung in the air. With a gentle tug they were being hauled in.

‘Her lines are out,’ said Harry. ‘We’ll be secure groundside soon enough.’

‘After we land we should send out a scout,’ said Steamswipe, ‘and observe the lay of the land. You could use the crawl space in the engines as a vantage point.’

‘Not for an hour or two I couldn’t. Right now that rotor drive is hot enough to fry a side of gammon. But there’s another way. I can do a soul walking.’

‘You can do that?’ asked Oliver. ‘I thought it was dangerous. Even my fey-finders from the Department of Feymist couldn’t do that and old Pullinger was a four-flower worldsinger.’

‘It takes concentration,’ said Harry. ‘You fill yourself with so much of the earth’s power that it can surge and sever the connection between your soul and your body — leaving you a mindless corpse. But I won’t travel that far. Just a quick poke about, nearby. A true soul walker could float all the way to Hundred Locks and back.’

The disreputable Stave moved his pack to the side of their nest among the barrels of gas and adopted a lotus position. ‘No noise now — an interrupted trance and you’ll be spoon-feeding me gruel until the crushers catch up with me.’

Oliver sensed the presence of the wolftaker lift from his body, drift through the chamber and slip through the catenary curtain of the aerostat. They waited in the shadows of the hold. An orange light on Lord Wireburn’s side had begun blinking. The holy relic was ready for the fight and with a start Oliver realized so was he. Harry shook himself out of the trance.

‘What do we face?’ asked Steamswipe.

Harry looked pale. ‘Give me a moment, old stick.’ He made a noise with his throat. ‘Circle. My skin feels like it’s on fire. All right, we’ve come down in Middlemarsh Forest. There’s an old mine behind us. Hasn’t been worked for a long time. Most of the buildings have been abandoned — but the shaft’s been cleared and the winch house has been rebuilt. I couldn’t go any deeper into the mine, the ground blocks a soul walking.’

‘How many foe?’

‘There’s crushers here — or at least, whippers in police uniform. Much the same thing in my book. Some others hanging around — they’ve got spore filters on their collars, so I’d say they’re from the undercity, Grimhope outlaws. But that’s not the worst of it. There’s Special Guard here!’

‘Almost a worthy foe,’ said Steamswipe. He sounded pleased. ‘Their natural template has been distorted — their abilities in battle will be surprising.’

Oliver extended his newfound senses, touched the souls of the people on the ground and recoiled from their depravity. Wickedness, here, from those that were charged as protectors of Jackals. Could there be a greater treachery?

‘They’re getting ready to unload the miners from Shadowclock. The poor devils are in leg irons in the main hold,’ said Harry. ‘But why an abandoned mine? There’s no celgas here.’

‘There’s evil here,’ said Oliver. ‘And something else besides…’

They both stared at him. ‘What do you know about this place, lad?’

‘I know how to read, Harry. Before these jiggers stole my life that’s all I had to do. This place was in the penny sheets a couple of years back. Three children playing about in a worked-out copper mine found temple statues. Solid gold and gems for eyes. The mine was given to the archaeologists from the eight universities and the county constabulary had to fight off treasure seekers and tomb robbers coming out from the capital, hoping to dig out a fortune.’

‘The governor isn’t risking his neck at the gallows for gold,’ said Harry. ‘You can skim far more than the price of a few antiques from the patronage that comes with the governorship of Shadowclock. Whatever their jig here, they need miners to work their claim. Deep mine experience. The statues were from the coldtime?’

‘Chimecan, Harry. I think they went on display at the museum in Middlesteel.’

‘Okay, here’s the lay of the land. We wait for the Shadowclock miners to disembark and then we drop the ramp and head for the trees. There are plenty of people around. Even if we are spotted they’re as like to assume we’re crew. In the woods we’ll set up an observation and see if we can grab one of their people — find out where the miners are ending up and see how easy it’s going to be to penetrate this bleeding place.’

Oliver could feel the apprehension of the miners, their fear of the unknown as they descended the main loading ramp, and the hard hearts of the guards watching them. They did not see the miners as people at all, just a means to an end.

It was morning outside. As they lowered the ramp the bright light made Oliver wince after the darkness of the hold. Down. Walk casually — with purpose. Not three scuttling intruders fleeing the shadow of the airship. Crewmen. Then Oliver heard the shout and risked a glance back. There, by the line of resigned workers being ushered into the gates of the old mine. It was the Whisperer! A shambling child-sized feybreed, so distorted by the mist it was hard to see where his limbs began and his torso ended. But it was not the Whisperer’s bitter soul inside the fey creature; and this thing wore plated armour — a worldsinger containment suit — metal shells covered in runes and strung tightly together with wire. It was pointing at them and howling like it was caught in the embrace of a torture rack. Pointing straight at Oliver.

From the cover of the trees they were heading for a patrol of redcoats stepped out into the clearing.

‘Now we fight,’ said Steamswipe.

Oliver’s hands burned searing. He looked down and reali zed that the reverend’s gifts had appeared there. Harry stared at the two guns open-mouthed like a man whose life had ended. A shot splintered past them. Steamswipe turned and Lord Wireburn shot out a ball of revolving fire — a miniature sun that slapped into the guards behind them. Seven soldiers were incinerated, a splash of jelly-like fire landing on the nearest guards. Steamswipe fired again. After each shot Lord Wireburn let out a shriek, half an inhalation, half a gagging exhalation, as if the holy weapon was sucking in the life of the deceased.

Both of Oliver’s pistols discharged, two attackers were hammered off their feet, then he flicked the guns open, reloading from his bandoleer with a smooth mechanical precision. The disreputable Stave was moving in witch-time, his long-barrelled pistol in his hand. Oliver could follow him now; see the distortion of the bones of the earth as Harry drank in its energy, leylines snaking around his feet, twisting and pulsing. Stave’s pistol crackled, the charge smoke momentarily shrouding the perplexed look on his face. Oliver could see from a dozen perspectives simultaneously: aeronauts from the stat climbing back up the ramp, miners fleeing for cover, redcoats in front, the Grimhope outlaws by the mine entrance.

Oliver laughed like a demon, knowing that the sound of it would unnerve them all. The attacking patrol had discharged their rifles and rather than reloading they were closing at a rush with wicked bayonets fixed, screaming in rage and fear. Steamswipe let his own voice be heard, the echo from his voicebox collapsing a redcoat even as the steamman galloped into their company. A machine of death, he swung his hammer arm in fast meticulous arcs, crumpling soft bodies, staving in skulls, trampling down the soldiers under his hooves. They were almost on Oliver now. He raised his left hand and put a lead ball through the face of one of the soldiers, side-stepping a bayonet thrust. He shattered the bayonet owner’s knee with a kick — pistol-whipping the back of the soldier’s head as the man’s bayonet caught in the mud.

Harry was by his side, then gone and just as suddenly back, tripping up the attackers in a blur of boots. Oliver sensed the rifleman taking aim at them from the top of the mine works; saw the barrel sighting on his own spine. Tipping his right arm over his shoulder his uncharged pistol bucked once, the marksman’s corpse tumbling off the roof. He had not even looked.

Harry had stopped moving and was looking up at the sky. ‘Not bloody now!’

Explosions flowered around them, dirt showering into the air. A wave of searing heat punched Oliver to the ground and earth plummeted down on him by the spadeful, as if manic diggers tossing clods of mud had surrounded him and were feverishly digging him a grave. He was deaf now — petals of flame erupted all around him in silent fury. Both pistols were still in his hands, solid and reassuring. Half interred beneath the earth Oliver watched as ropes coiled down through the smoke, ladders for vengeful angels in black leather capes and visored hoods with rubber tubes hanging at either side.

Oliver could not see out of their eyes, could not feel their souls — could barely sense their presence at all. Harry’s words came back to him. ‘We’ve got a military arm called the incrementalsfor the hard slap work. Proper killers. If they hadcome after us neither of us would be alive to be discussing it now.’

One of them swept him with a mirrored gaze, hardly registering his existence. Not a threat. Then an identical warrior emerged from the smoke, a body slung limply over its shoulder, the victim’s trousers and waistcoat torn to shreds by the explosions. The disreputable Stave! The Court of the Air was reclaiming their rogue wolftaker. Both incrementals were heading for a rope ladder emerging from the dark scud of their barrage — a ladder that for all intents and purposes might be reaching to the ceiling of the sky.

Moaning with the pain of the effort, Oliver pulled out the knife from his boot and tried to rise; but a spiked boot kicked it from his hand before he could activate the witch-blade — a third incremental tracking backwards towards the rope. The warrior’s hand reached out and a finger wagged slowly backwards and forwards. ‹Naughty, naughty.›

In his other hand the incremental held a rifle with a barrel as long as a lance, covering Oliver with its muzzle. They were leaving him behind. But then what did they care about a young registered man ripped from his home and tossed into their savage world? Just one more body for the crushers’ justice and the doomsman’s gallows. Oliver laughed. If he lived through the coming cataclysm, they would care enough. He would make them. The warrior stopped, briefly surprised by the eerie sound of mirth. Then he was at the rope ladder and hauling himself up after the other two incrementals. The ladder began to lift out of sight.

Oliver cursed and retrieved his knife. Bursting through the smoke, Steamswipe came galloping into view, scanned Oliver and glanced up to the occluded sky. He pointed Lord Wireburn up at a firmament hidden by the dark murk of battle. ‘It is an aerosphere,’ said the holy weapon. ‘I have its signature sighted. Forty feet above us.’

‘Can you bring it down?’ Oliver coughed, getting to his feet.

‘I am an annihilator, little softbody, not a birding rifle from a Jackelian gunsmith,’ said Lord Wireburn. ‘I can destroy it, or I can let it go. It is at seventy feet now.’

‘Let it go. Bloody Circle!’

Harry was gone. They would break his mind and then whatever was left of his body would be tossed into a holding cell, to rot next door to all of the other undesirables who had crossed the Court. His friend, his guide had vanished — all that was left was the terrible hunger and evil that had found Oliver in Hundred Locks and stalked him across the face of Jackals. His hope had gone, but there was the wickedness. He could still feel that.

‘Reinforcements are coming out of the mine,’ said Oliver.

Steamswipe scooped him up with his blood-slicked hammer and his manipulator arm, dropping him onto his back. Across the sundered ground a line of figures broke through the smoke and the burning gorse, black leather cloaks rising in the heat of the fire. The Special Guard and a handful of the Whisperer-like feybreed. As soon as they caught sight of Oliver, the Whisperer-things struck out at his mind, pulses of hateful energy darting at his mentality. At the same time a Special Guardsman raised his arm, pouring cerulean flames at Oliver and his steamman steed. Blue flame licked off an invisible dome surrounding them while Oliver caught the biting darts of the mind assault and twisted them back towards their owners, the Whisperer-things tumbling screaming onto the ground.

‘A worldsinger,’ cried one of the guardsmen.

‘No,’ said Captain Flare, emerging from the line. ‘He is one of us. Can’t you feel his power? He is a brother of the mist.’

Steamswipe surged forward, Lord Wireburn spitting fluidic sun-spheres at the line. Oliver barely held onto the stampeding knight. ‘Let me make you brothers to the worms, you damn murdering softbodies. Steelbhalah-Waldo! Steelbhalah-Waldo!’

Oliver scarcely kept up with the scattering line — some speeded up into witch-time blurs, others turned invisible or swelled up into iron-solid mountains of flesh. Several of Lord Wireburn’s sun spheres disappeared into swirling rips in the air, others splattered against a wall of circular orange shields which had been conjured in front of the Special Guardsmen. Steamswipe rode down a guardswoman, his hammer upper-cutting another in the chest, lifting the guard high into the air. The steamman had gone into a berserker frenzy; Oliver could feel the purity of his rage, the righteousness of his fury. Attacks lashed out from all four sides but Oliver turned them back, diverted them, slapped each of them down. Fire, ice, darts of porcupine spine, the claw-like attempts to batter inside his mind. Faster and faster they struck.

Oliver caught the presence of the two Grimhope outlaws behind them, crossbows loaded with a weight of bolas. A pistol bucked in Oliver’s hand and the ball caught an outlaw in his gut. His compatriot fired and the rotating bolas caught Steamswipe’s hind legs, snarling the knight. As the steamman tripped Oliver flew off with all the momentum of the stalled dash. More Grimhopers rushed him from the rear, fey energies licking out from the front. Too close to reload

Oliver pulled out his knife and activated it with a twist, the hilt squirming in his hand as it reacted to its owner’s presence. This blade had not been forged by the race of man. It was alive; it recognized the bloodline of Phileas Brooks.

‘Sword,’ said Oliver and the blade flowed upwards, a hilt curving out from the handle.

He moved through the charge of Grimhope outlaws and they kept running even as their chests separated from their legs in a rain of severed limbs while Oliver swept the witch-blade around in a fencer’s dance — the echo of earlier selves following him like a shadow, the ghost of his father among them. A howl of steam sounded behind him and Oliver dropped to one knee, skewering a brute with a trident. Captain Flare was riding Steamswipe’s back, one fist pummelling the knight’s boiler, the other pinning Lord Wireburn. His friend’s stacks were mewling as the source of his steamman strength leaked away. Steamswipe’s manipulator arms were twisted back; trying to unseat the Captain of the Special Guard and bring him within range of his hammer arm.

Oliver stepped forward to help Steamswipe but a figure shivered into life in front of him — an old woman in a guardsman’s cloak — either she had been invisible or she could throw her body across distances. She struck out and Oliver barely avoided her kick. Disconcerting. Like having to fight old Damson Griggs. His witch-blade flicked out to pierce her torc-bound throat, following its own enchanted curve of raw ruthlessness, but it seethed against a transparent shield of fire that sparked as the blade glanced off it. Oliver danced back, avoiding the discus of energy she was manifesting. He tried to neutralise the shield, but her fey power snaked out beneath his perception.

‘Raw power isn’t enough, boy,’ she said, circling him. ‘You need discipline, focus.’

His ears were still ringing from the explosions; her voice sounded like it was being carried through water. ‘Let’s see if it isn’t.’ His witch-blade ached in his grip, eager to sink itself through her chest. His pistols sung to be reloaded, a dozen past lives making him dizzy, detailing the hundred ways he could dispatch the old woman.

She sliced a clawed hand at Oliver and he stepped into her grasp, feeling the crackle of her skin, the energy of her fey-twisted soul — amplifying it, feeding it — making the fields glowing around her hands ignite as bright as one of Lord Wireburn’s sunbursts. Screaming, she fell back, her two hands ablaze. There was little evil in her soul, only determination and loyalty to her compatriots — an age served in the guard. He ignored the witch-blade’s call to carve her head off its neck and turned towards Steamswipe.

Captain Flare had battered the knight into semi-consciousness. Steamswipe’s boiler was twisted and deformed and venting steam from a dozen tears, the light of his vision plate a faint red smear behind his visor. Wrathful, Oliver bounded forward, his witch-blade looping out, boiling to sever one of those perfectly muscled arms from the captain’s trunk. But the witch-knife flexed off the Special Guardsman’s arm, its blade quivering in agony. After centuries of use it had finally sliced into something dense enough to resist its passage.

Flare closed on him. ‘How did the fey-finders miss you, boy? You should have joined the guard years ago.’

Oliver rolled past his grip and thrust the tip of the witch-blade into his knee, the blade distorting and retracting back into its knife-size in protest. ‘I prefer my freedom.’

Flare slapped the blade out of his hand, turning to land a punch on Oliver’s face. ‘Then we have something in common, mist-brother.’

Oliver reached out and dampened the fey energies in the pile-driving jab. But even as a mortal the captain’s flesh had been built up by years in the muscle-pits — it was not just for impressing Jackals’ citizenry when he escorted the monarch. Oliver fell back reeling. Another Special Guardsman was behind him and Oliver drained the blue fire that erupted towards his back, sinking it into a fold in the air. Then another guardsman appeared through the carnage wrought by the aerosphere, then a third and a fourth. Gravity turned upside down and Oliver cancelled it; the air turned cold enough to freeze solid but he heated it; he deflected a lance of light back into the feybreed mob as he turned away a blow to his spine from Flare. Oliver fired a charge into the empty space where the translucent guardsman was trying to sneak up on him, the broken glass of the shell crunching as he ejected it.

More Whisperer-things broke against his mind, compressing his skull with pain. Oliver severed their mental link, killing them instantly, but in the second it took to twist away their attack Captain Flare landed a kick against his side, not dampened. It was as if someone had collapsed a house around him. He tried to rise but a dozen guardsmen were on top of him, striking with their fists and their boots and their mist-gifted powers.

They hauled him to his feet, beaten and bloody. Steamswipe was behind them, wheezing and broken on the chewed-up ground. Oliver’s bruised eyes rolled across the sky. No sign of the aerosphere. Harry had gone, forced to face the Court’s justice at last. It was over. Oliver had failed Jackals and the Lady of the Lights, failed to punish his family’s killers, failed to honour his father’s legacy or even to protect his friends’ lives.

‘What’s it to be, brother?’ said Flare.

‘I see you,’ Oliver roared. ‘I see you all. The evil that taints your souls.’ He concentrated on the fallen steamman. Lord Wireburn flew from the side of the prone knight and out towards Oliver’s hand, only to slap into the grip of a Special Guardsman who shimmered into existence between them. The guardsman reversed the holy weapon and shoved its ebony butt into his face. Then Oliver’s thrashing really began.