The Court of the Air

Chapter Twenty-Two

Commodore Black had been maudlin ever since Oliver had turned them back from the walls of Tock House. ‘Has it come to this, then? A company of Commonshare oafs billeted in my fine house. Draining my cellar and packing everything of value in their knapsacks for their journey home.’

‘They were waiting for us,’ said Oliver. ‘Tzlayloc will have our blood codes posted with every patrol in Middlesteel.’

‘Ah, lad, do not say that. Let’s make a run for the coast and leave Jackals to Tzlayloc and his cohorts.’

Oliver shook his head. There was no distance far enough to make them safe if Jackals fell to the Wildcaotyl. So they had crept past the outside privy and into the back yard of the only house in the capital where Oliver imagined he might receive a half-friendly welcome. He tried the back door. Locked.

‘Let me pass, lad. I have a small talent with locks.’ The commodore picked up an old nail nearly covered over by the snow and started to lever it gently into the door’s mechanism. ‘Listen to the canny tumblers clicking, this is a better lock than the door it stands in, Oliver.’

‘Not a talent that I would imagine comes in useful often on an underwater boat?’

‘Poor old Blacky, pursued for his family name with nothing but a gallows or a cell in the royal breeding house waiting for him. You would acquire a knack for picking locks too if you were in my sea boots.’

With a clack the door opened into a darkened room. The whole place looked deserted, just the smell of blow-barrel sap and gun oil to welcome them.

‘Step forward,’ said a voice. ‘Run and I’ll cut you down.’

‘Mother?’ said Oliver. ‘It’s me, Oliver Brooks. Phileas’s son.’

A small oil lamp lit up with a strike of its igniter. Mother Loade was sitting in an armchair with a barrel-sized gun pointing at them — the same kind of pressure repeater he had seen the steammen knights carrying around Mechancia. No range, but deadly this close.

‘Where’s Harold, boy.’

Oliver pointed a finger to the ceiling. ‘Snatched.’

She tutted. ‘So naughty Harold’s luck finally ran out. Not that it matters much now.’

‘We tried out front first, Mother. Your shop sign’s down and the windows are boarded up. If I hadn’t seen your adverts in the back of Field and Fern I wouldn’t have been able to find your place.’

‘Why do you think that is, boy? My useless husband ran for the coast when the shifties showed up and my apprentices have all disappeared. Right now all my trade is good for is a place on a production line in an armaments workshop.’

Oliver flicked his eyes enquiringly towards the ceiling.

‘I got a penny note from my son before the crystalgrid went down. One word. Bedtime. Do you know what that means, boy?’

‘Blessed Circle,’ said the commodore. ‘Oliver, this damson you have brought old Blacky to in our hour of need, she’s not what I think she is, is she? This damson’s with the Court, isn’t she?’

Mother Loade looked at the commodore. ‘You, I don’t know.’

‘Run silent, run deep. That’s what your little crystalgrid message means. Like a boat being hunted by a Jackelian aerostat. Except this time around it’s the shifties doing the hunting. And all the wolftakers and whistlers doing the hiding.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘That’s just a little bit more than you should know. Are you trade?’

‘Ah lass, poor old Blacky is no player in the vicious games run by you and your friends. He’s only the poor fox, hunted down without mercy by the wolftakers for the unhappy accident of his birth.’

‘Well dearie, now there’s three of us that don’t want to be questioned at a barricade or checkpoint-’ she stopped as she saw Oliver taking off his coat, eyes widening at the brace of pistols holstered at his side.

‘I kept your knife,’ said Oliver.

‘Sweet Circle,’ she whispered. ‘They really exist.’ She extended a hand and Oliver passed one of the pistols over. Mother Loade held the gun, her hand trembling as she marvelled at the silver engraving, the carefully rendered lions of Jackals, their malevolent patina.

‘I never thought I would see one of these.’ She looked up at Oliver. ‘I can’t protect you now, boy. Not for your father’s memory. They’ll come for you, eventually.’

Oliver took back the pistol and slid it into the holster. ‘Harry didn’t know about these, did he?’

‘He’s not a weaponsmith,’ said Mother. ‘And he never did have much time for legends. But the Court of the Air has weaponsmiths, boy. From places you wouldn’t even believe. They will understand, they will know. They always do.’

‘They have other things to occupy them right now,’ said Oliver.

From the front door a banging sounded, Mother jumping in her chair. Oliver extended his senses and his heart sank, a shiftie officer and a company of the metal-fleshers stood in the street. Commodore Black peered through a crack in the boarded-up window. ‘Blessed troops in the passage behind the shop too.’

Mother waved at the rifles racked on the shelves. ‘Who would have thought the Carlists read Field and Fern too? We’re blown. What do you think the punishment for possession of a private armoury is?’

Oliver slid two glass charges from his bandolier. ‘I don’t believe the new courts will favour transportation.’

‘Already tried that.’ Mother Loade walked down the corridor, trailing an accordion-like pipe from her steamman gun back to her pressure stove. ‘I’m too old for this nonsense.’

‘Open up,’ commanded the voice from outside the door. ‘In the name of the Jackelian Commonshare.’

‘Don’t worry dearie,’ shouted Mother Loade. Her giant steamman weapon began to whistle like a kettle. ‘I’m about to open up for you.’

She pushed a lever up on the weapon and it screeched with a noise like a saw blade tearing through a log. The door shattered in half, covering Oliver, the commodore and Mother in a back-blast of splinters. Mother kicked away the two halves of the door hanging from its frame. When she pushed the lever back on the gun there was a rain of metal balls from the weapon’s canister as the gun’s gravity feed kicked in, reloading.

The officer had been thrown to the other side of the street, his blue uniform turned into a mess of crimson rags.

‘Welcome to Middlesteel, dearie.’ She turned to the equalized revolutionaries and hefted up the pressure repeater. ‘And as for you lot, you’re a bloody disgrace.’

‘Mother, no!’

Oliver dragged the commodore back into the shelter of the shop as she triggered the heavy weapon, the storm of pellets hosing across the metal-fleshers; the revolutionaries were thrown back, death by a thousand cuts as balls ruptured iron and pierced their buried organs, the blizzard of ricochets cracking windows in the street and raising clouds of brick dust. The sawing noise cut off. Mother was lying face down in the street and Oliver ran over to her. Rolled her over. She was bleeding from a hundred ricochet wounds, her eyes fighting to stay open. ‘I’ll tell your father when I see him, dearie, before I move along the Circle.’

‘I know you will.’ He could barely hear her. She raised a liver-spotted hand to rest on Oliver’s pistol, the gun seeming to feed her the energy she needed for one last whisper. ‘Don’t trust them — Oliver. Never — trust — the — Court of — the Air.’

She was gone. He lowered her down, her back staining the snow red. Black shouted a warning. The troops from around the back of the shop had found their way to the front of the street. Oliver heard whistles. They sounded like crushers, but he doubted any constables from Ham House would be responding to the call.

Oliver staggered back towards the shop. Commodore Black wanted Mother’s gun, but first he had to prize it away from her dead fingers. He dragged the pressure repeater and its pipe back through the doorway. Equalized revolutionaries with pikes trotted down the street towards them, following their Quatershiftian officers.

‘Sorry, lad,’ said the commodore. ‘I think this is our last stand.’

Oliver sighed. Mother would keep glass-lined casks of blow-barrel sap in her cellar next door to the tools of the glass blower’s trade. They could blow them, follow Steamswipe’s example and take a street’s worth of the jiggers with them.

‘I’m sorry too, commodore. We should have run for the coast, hidden among the crowds of refugees.’ Oliver felt tired, like he could sleep for a thousand years. In a few minutes he would have an eternity of peace.

‘None of the would have, could have, should have now, lad. They’ve chased you down for your fey blood as they’ve chased old Blacky down for the royal claret that runs through my veins. Let’s sell it to them blessed dear.’

The witch-blade was in Oliver’s fist, extending out like a lizard’s tongue, feeding him shadow memories of his father facing a hunting team of toppers. Commodore Black rested the smoking pressure repeater on the shop’s counter and covered the entrance. The battle cries of the enemy were getting nearer. Oliver checked both his pistols were loaded, the heat from the steamman gun warming his face.

Harry Stave was in a Court cell, what was left of his mind ripped to shreds by the wolftakers’ truth hexing. Steamswipe and Lord Wireburn were walking the halls of the Steamo Loas. Oliver could almost feel their shades standing beside him.

‘I’ll see you soon.’

The enemy was upon them, filling the passage, breaking down the boarded windows of Loade and Locke’s establishment.

‘Send us the Third Brigade,’ Oliver shouted above the saw-scream of the commodore’s gun. ‘Send them all.’

Molly and Slowstack were almost across the bridge, a swaying line of glass bricks threaded together with silver cable, the transparent crossing giving them an all too apparent view of the chasm below. It was so hot this far down in the earth, lava running in streams and lakes, bubbling rivers filling the corridors with choking fumes. Once these hidden holds had echoed to the boots of the masters of an underworld empire that covered the entire continent, but the Chimecans had faded long ago. Now only their crystals remained, their sorceries still sucking the power of the earthflow and filling the world they had created with an eerie, inconstant light.

The vision struck Molly without warning, Slowstack grabbing her as she stumbled against the hand cable.

‘Do you see her?’ asked the steamman.

‘I see her,’ confirmed Molly. The ghostly figure of the small girl stood at the far end of the crystal bridge.

‹They come,› said the Hexmachina.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Are you close?’ asked Molly.

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

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

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

Molly felt ashamed.

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

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

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

‘Powerful enough,’ said Molly.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Do you hear it lad?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black nodded. ‘With the best of them.’

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

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

A howling echoed around the rookery streets.

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

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

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

The clatter of boots ahead made his words a lie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘They’ll never stop hunting you.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘That could take months,’ said Flare. ‘Where is the aerostat they promised us?’

‘Problems there too,’ replied the guardsman. ‘There’s a vessel we can use but we’re trying to scare up a merchant crew to fly her.’

‘Merchant? What about the navy, the jack cloudies?’

‘Seems the mutiny at Shadowclock didn’t go as well as was hoped, commander. The fleet had been half-purged, but someone slipped word to the navigators and pilots. When the citadel fell the deck officers had vanished — Tzlayloc’s people have been running aeronauts through the Gideon’s Collar trying to get the survivors to collaborate.’

Flare shook his head in frustration. ‘No doubt inspiring the same loyalty we felt towards the order. These idiots couldn’t organize a harvest-merrie, let alone a revolution. This is no way to overthrow a tyranny! Where is the Third Brigade liaison?’

Bonefire indicated the scene below the chamber’s window. ‘Someone at the Brigade must have heard you.’

Down below, Marshal Arinze’s retinue followed the leader of the Third Brigade as he swept imperiously past the shadow of the Gideon’s Collar set up in the palace square. Captain Flare got to his feet as the Marshal came through the door, his pet wolftaker in tow wearing a plain blue Quatershiftian brigade tunic.

‘Marshal, I had no idea you were personally involved with the quartermaster’s office.’

Arinze took the supply orders, looked at them, then passed them contemptuously back to a staff officer. ‘Hardly, compatriot captain. Your store requisitions have been put on hold.’

‘On hold?’ said Bonefire, his tone less than respectful.

Arinze ignored the mere guardsman and addressed his comments to the captain. ‘Things are not moving as fast as they should be, compatriot captain. Middlesteel is ours but elsewhere in Jackals the forces of tyranny are organizing against us. We have not yet managed to float the RAN and our scouts report that some of the survivors from Fulven Fields are organizing Jackals’ regiments along the southern frontier.’

‘That is not our concern,’ said Flare. ‘Lower the cursewall; bring more troops across on the atmospheric; chase off the gunboats in the Sepia Sea and land soldiers in the north. It is not my job to teach your forces how to campaign.’

‘The First Committee of Jackals believes it is your concern,’ said Marshal Arinze. ‘If you want to claim your territory you will have to earn it.’

Flare pointed an irate finger at Arinze. ‘Claim! We are not applicants at the board of the poor, Marshal. The Fey Free State is ours. We have a deal with Tzlayloc; we have worked with him, not for him. The Special Guard is not yet an arm of the brilliant men and the Middlesteelians you have been slaughtering may be hamblins, but they are still citizens of Jackals.’

Arinze snapped his fingers and was handed a sheaf of rolled papers. ‘All revolutions come with a butcher’s bill attached, compatriot captain. It’s time you got your hands dirty. Here are your orders from the First Committee.’

Flare tore off the wax seal and scanned the papers. ‘March on the uplands under the command of the second company of the Third Brigade. Is this a joke? We had a deal, Arinze. We would mutiny when they ordered us into action against you, but we told you we would not fight against our own regiments. We ensured the RAN would be docked in harbour when you attacked. We made sure every Guardian, every commercial lord and person of quality in Jackals would be in Middlesteel for the coronation when you arrived. Without the Special Guard the remnants of your army would be limping its way back to Quatershift pulling shards of fin-bomb crystal out of their uniforms.’

‘No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy, compat riot captain. Times have changed. The deal has changed.’

‘Jigger you!’ shouted Bonefire. ‘You dirty hamblin, you want a change of deal? Let’s see how you enjoy my terms…’

Fire lashed out from the guardsman’s fist, bathing the Marshal in wraithlike light. Arinze dropped to the floor of the palace screaming in distress. Flare pushed the arm of the Special Guardsman towards the ceiling, dragging Bonefire away kicking from the Quatershiftian officer.

‘Let’s see if Tzlayloc and his committee men want to renegotiate when I rip your skull off and toss it to them in a sack, you shiftie scum,’ shouted Bonefire.

Arinze got to his feet. ‘Striking an officer of the Third Brigade is a capital offence, compatriot guardsman.’

‘I’m not in your army, shiftie. I barely even belong to the race of man anymore.’

‘Execute him!’ shouted Arinze.

Behind the marshal two worldsingers stepped out of his retinue and circled Bonefire chanting. The Special Guardsman started to laugh, but his expression turned to shock as his body started folding in on itself, caught in an invisible press. Around his neck the hexes on the silver torc glowed, the fire of their brilliance sucking in air and whistling around his body like a kettle coming to the boil. The Special Guardsman’s arms and legs made popping noises, crushed under their own weight, red slashes hurtling across his skin as veins exploded. Bonefire twisted like a corkscrew, held erect in a hidden field before them as his muscles were crushed beyond use. The two worldsingers stopped their chanting and the bloody mess that was left flopped to the palace flagstones with a sickening slap.

Flare’s hand had unconsciously moved to the torc around his neck. ‘You-’

‘It took a long time for our worldsingers to unlock the hexes on your little necklaces,’ said Marshal Arinze. ‘I am told it took a dedicated team three years to solve them. Another two years to leave them in place but neutralize the trigger. Do you really think we went to all that trouble to leave a military force as powerful as the Special Guard in the field unchecked? We did not neutralize the hexes, compatriot captain, we modified them.’

Flare stumbled back. ‘What have I done, what have I done?’

‘Do not worry, compatriot captain, you shall have your territory in the south. After you have fought for it — after you have earned it. You will like serving as part of the Third Brigade. We are not prudes like Compatriot Tzlayloc and his First Committee with their funny little ways. Nobody in the Commonshare of Quatershift will be lining up to have their bodies changed in your flesh mills. We are proud of our bodies — they must be kept strong to serve the revolution.’ Arinze ran his hands down Major Wildrake’s chest. ‘Your guardsmen have been blessed with power and that power will serve us very well. You shall breed your city of fey-born, and your children will become the shock troops of the revolution.’

‘We are free,’ said Flare, as if repeating it would make it true.

‘There is no greater freedom than service to the community,’ said Arinze. ‘And service as the guardians of the cause has its rewards. Circlist prigs do not command us; we do not hang our soldiers for taking women, we do not hang them for stealing poultry from the henhouse of an enemy peasant. For hard men to be asked to do hard things in the name of the people, to inflict terror on the enemy, they must be kept as sharp as the sabres they carry.’

‘It must be difficult for you, Flare,’ said Major Wildrake. ‘I am a Jackelian too, I understand. But these people recognize the nature of our race. They opened my eyes to the principles of community, showed me how soft and weak I had become — how decadent Jackals had become.’

‘Sometimes it takes one not born in the Commonshare to see its true beauty,’ said Marshal Arinze. ‘Now, where is the King who missed his crown — where is the pup?’

‘Alpheus?’ said Flare. ‘What do you want with him?’

‘For my part, nothing. Tzlayloc wants him.’

Flare’s voice sounded on edge. ‘Prince Alpheus helped the revolution, he helped ensure everyone was in Middlesteel when you needed them there.’

‘And now Compatriot Alpheus is to serve the revolution again.’

‘How is he to serve it?’ Captain Flare demanded.

Arinze motioned a party of worldsingers and soldiers to search the palace. ‘A question better put to Chairman Tzlayloc. Like I said, your countrymen do have their funny little ways.’

‘Deals change,’ mumbled Flare. His guardsmen eyed the worldsingers among the shiftie troops with unconcealed loathing. That strange fey boy they had captured had been eerily prophetic — in the end they had only swapped one set of masters for another.

Molly had never run so far or so fast before — even Slowstack’s inexhaustible body had trouble keeping pace with her. There was a strange hum in her legs; a pain that only the exertion of running seemed to cancel. The very stuff of her blood fizzed with her increasing proximity to the Hexmachina, and the closer she got the more her body was changed. She could feel the pain of the earth now, the tunnels and cities of Chimeca like scar tissue over an old wound; the hex-engraved crystals that powered their cities were leeches, sapping the world’s energy. Below ground the leylines had become veins of enormous energy, the rock and the magma teeming with tiny life — earthflow: a world’s weight of it — the soul of the earth, breathing, sighing, pained by the coarse manipulations which the old gods were weaving through the gaps in the wall of reality.

And there was something else she could sense — on the surface, not underground — something pure and deadly stalking the earth. It was well hidden, but, however hard it screened itself, to the earth the entity’s invisible passage was like the tip of a knife teased across her sensitive skin. Molly was becoming a butterfly, but her body, her chrysalis, was still there to remind her of the urges of the race of man. She realized she was starving. Without thinking she changed course, led herself and Slowstack out of the tunnel they were following — an old micro-atmospheric connecting the estate of a Chimecan priest lord to one of their cities — and through a crevice in the wall into a cavern.

Above them buildings grew down from the ceiling like stalactites, tiered inverted ziggurats. Stone streets divided the cavern floor, raised, and — apart from the cracks of age and ceiling falls — so well preserved that it was easy to think the Chimecans had just left the city a couple of minutes ago. Fields of swaying stalks with bulbous heads grew in the shadows of the raised streets, a clear crystal pyramid in the centre of each field flaring up as lightning forks exchanged between their tips and the ceiling crystals above; energy drawn from the earthflow and dispersed by the pyramid structures to the crops.

Molly sprinted along one of the empty streets towards the pit-like fields. ‘Food, Slowstack, a whole cavern of it.’

The steamman accelerated to keep up, his tracks crunching the dusty flagstones. ‘Molly softbody, you must not feed from this.’

She waved at the pits, the tall crops shivering as they sucked energy from the pyramids. ‘The crops have been waiting here for a thousand years. Nobody is here to stop us.’

‘Use your senses, Molly softbody. Touch the stalks with your mind, feel all of the crop’s essence, not just its surface.’

She did as the steamman bid and recoiled in disgust, fighting to keep from gagging. Her hunger had vanished.

‘If you fed from this crop you would end up like Tzlayloc, Molly softbody, mad and consumed with a terrible unending hunger. When the coldtime came, the states that would become the empire of Chimeca fed their masses with the most abundant resource their flesh mages had to draw upon.’

‘People,’ said Molly. ‘Sweet Circle, those crops used to be people.’

‘It was simple to change their pattern using the empire’s dark sorceries,’ said Slowstack. ‘There were millions on the surface who would have died from the cold anyway. The imperial legions took the seed crop as tribute from the nations of the surface.’

She could see it now. Legs, arms and body fused into a single stalk, the indentations on the bulb where a face used to be, their essence blended with moss and lichen so they could divide and be fruitful. For a hundred generations this harvest of people-plants had grown in the artificial light of a fallen empire, fed by the life force of the rotating world. The people-plants were not just the descendants of her race, either. Some of the fields had been graspers, lashlites and craynarbians; the Chimecans needed variety in their diet. No wonder the Hexmachina had abandoned the contemptible race of man to warm her body in the core of the earth.

‘These plants may be unfit to consume, Molly softbody, but the water that feeds them will be drawn from the fallen empire’s holds under the seabed, purified by miles of filter glass. We need to replenish our boiler system, as do you.’

The steamman led them down the raised street to a ramp cut into the stone. Molly did not want to enter the field pit, but her thirst got the better of her. Row upon row of the fleshy plants lay formed up in front of her, the green skin of their stalks felted in a light covering of fur, the bulbs crowned in a husk that had looked like an acorn shell from a distance, but appeared like a matted crust of human hair now that she was closer.

Slowstack discovered the reservoir mouth feeding the irrigation channels, a statue in the shape of a swollen beetle. He opened his panel and drained as much water from the emerald beetle carving as his tanks would allow. Molly had been relying on his boiler for her water, so now she took the opportunity to slake her thirst. The liquid was as cold and as pure as any water she had tasted above ground — a cut above what came out of the taps in the public baths of Middlesteel for sure. Her feet crunched on something on the ground; Molly bent down to examine it. There was a scent on the husks. Where had she smelt that musk before?

‘Slowstack…’

The steamman shifted his attention from the flow of water and towards Molly.

‘Slowstack, if we are alone down here, why are there dried husks broken up next to the water supply?’

‘We fear there is no reassuring answer to that question, Molly softbody. Let us leave as quickly as we can.’

Slowstack was halfway up the ramp of the harvest pit when a bolt of energy cut past his torso and ricocheted off a pyramid in the next field over, the dispersion mechanism singing in anger and burning the people-stalks nearby with a storm of lightning. At the other end of the cavern two figures were leaping down stairs leading from the inverted ziggurats, their bodies glowing with a black radiation, radiant with the hideous glory of the Wildcaotyl. Their hunters!

‘The crevice,’ called Slowstack, his voicebox tinny at its maximum volume. ‘Back to the tunnel.’

‘No, Slowstack.’ Molly pulled the steamman back down the ramp. ‘If you trust me, old steamer, then follow me now.’

She sprinted along the walls of the pit then ducked through the irrigation channel, submerging herself below the surface of the cold water.

‘Molly softbody, have you taken leave of your senses?’

She climbed out of the channel, her clothes soaking. ‘Through the plants and out of the cavern at the other side.’

‘That is the longest route out of the chamber.’

She grabbed his manipulator hand. ‘I know.’

Her feet tingled as they plunged into the harvest, the energy feeding the people-plants through the soil grid trickling up into her legs, making her calf muscles prickle and twitch. Stalks sprang back from the steamman’s tracks, the bulbs swaying in mute agony above her head as the two of them carved an impromptu path through the crops. They lost sight of the pit walls and the raised streets, but Molly trusted Slowstack’s metal-born navigation sense to keep their path true.

To their left the bulbs of the plants erupted in a shower of fleshy pulp as an ebony bolt from one of their pursuer’s glowing fists expended its violence. The two convicts were firing blind and the Chimecan crops were absorbing the worst of it.

‘I’m going to hold you down, girl,’ shouted one of the hunters, his voice still faint in the distance. ‘Push you in the dirt while I chew pieces of your flesh off.’

Another bolt sent a cloud of stalk heads flying into the air.

‘Faster, Molly softbody.’ Slowstack’s vision plate was flaring as the nearby pyramid’s energy disturbed his own mechanisms.

‘You keep on shouting,’ muttered Molly to their pursuers. ‘Work yourself up into a nice hot sweat.’

The crops fell back. They had reached the far side of the plantation pit. Slowstack seized Molly and with a sudden burst of acceleration mounted the slope of the pit and sent them into the air over the raised roadway, landing with a crunch of protest on the street as his track-treads cycled in fury. Molly glanced back towards the plantation. The pair of convicts were two-thirds of the way across the harvest pit, oblivious to the vectors of swaying crops arrowing in on their position.

‘Molly softbody, we-’

‘Wait a second,’ said Molly, brushing the water from her dripping red hair.

A clamour rose from the crops, a clucking of rattle-like clicks, followed by a storm of white furred bodies leaping towards the men.

‘Wild pecks,’ said Slowstack, his head tracking the hunting cries of the lizard mammals.

Attracted by the blood frenzy more packs of the albino creatures were pulling themselves from the neighbouring harvest pits and drumming the flagstones with the wicked-looking claws on their right feet. They were clever, cleverer than the outlaws of Grimhope had realized. Molly could feel the waves of information contained in that drumming. These packs nested in the tunnels, near-blind, but all too aware of the value of the crop of meat tended by the Chimecan automatics. Nothing must be allowed to intrude on their rightful territory.

In the plantation they had climbed out of, a shockwave of energy blasted out, setting the crops burning, the bulb heads exploding in the heat. One of the hunters had fallen, the forces of his Wildcaotyl possession scything out in his death throes. The other would be snowed under by the albino killers before long.

In the heat of the deep caverns Molly’s clothes were going to dry out quickly. She would be sweating again too, soon. ‘Let’s press on, Slowstack.’