The Court of the Air

First Guardian Hoggstone tapped his shoe impatiently against the large porcelain vase standing by his writing desk, scenes of triumph from the civil war rendered delicately in obsidian blue. The weekly meeting with King Julius was a tiresome formality, little more than a cover for the chance to be updated by the commander of the Special Guard. Still, parliament held to its ancient forms. Two worldsingers stood silently flanking the door to the First Guardian’s office. Hoggstone smiled to himself. The Special Guard watched the King. The worldsingers watched the Special Guard. He watched the worldsingers. And who watched the First Guardian? Why, the electorate of course. That anonymous amorphous herd; that howling mob in waiting. Captain Flare came into the room. Without the King, but with the pup, Crown Prince Alpheus, in tow instead.

‘Julius?’ asked Hoggstone in a sharp voice.

‘Waterman’s sickness again,’ answered the captain. ‘He won’t be leaving the palace for at least a week.’

Hoggstone sighed and looked at the pup. It always made him nervous, seeing an almost crowned monarch with his arms still attached to his body.

‘Why, sir, is the boy not wearing his face mask?’

‘Asthma,’ said Captain Flare. ‘In the heat he chokes sometimes.’

‘I hate the mask,’ complained the prince. ‘The iron rubs my ears until they bleed.’

Hoggstone sighed again. ‘We’ll find you some royal whore, pup, for you to breed us the next king on. Then I’ll try and convince the house not to teach it to talk. Waste of bloody time having you able to say anything except parrot the vows of affirmation once a week.’

‘I hate you!’

Hoggstone rose up and drove a ham-sized fist into the prince’s stomach. The boy doubled up on the floor and the First Guardian kicked him in the head. ‘As it should be, Your Highness. Now shut up, or we’ll take your arms off early, cover them in gold plate and show them next to your father’s down in the People’s Hall.’

Flare lifted the gagging, gasping boy up and put him down on a chair. ‘Was that necessary, First Guardian?’

‘It was to me,’ said Hoggstone. The shepherd, that’s what they called Captain Flare behind his back. That’s what he had been, a herd boy, when a feymist had risen on the moors, turning Flare into a feybreed, giving him the kind of physical strength that demigods from classical history only dreamt about. But the man was soft, a useful fool protecting his new flock. The people. Yes. Everything for the people.

‘We’re not as modern as the Commonshare, sir,’ said Hoggstone. ‘Running all our nobles through a Gideon’s Collar. We still have to rely on a bit of shoe leather and a stout Jackelian foot every now and then.’

‘It’s putting the Jackelian boot in that you want to talk about?’ asked Flare. ‘The Carlists?’

‘I don’t even know if we can call the people we’re facing Carlists any more,’ said Hoggstone. ‘The local mob seems to have moved beyond the normal communityist platitudes our compatriots in Quatérshift have been mouthing of late.’

‘You suspect something?’

‘There’s trouble being stirred in the streets. Too much and too widely spread for it to be anything other than organized.’

‘That’s what the House of Guardians’ Executive Investigations Arm is for,’ said Flare.

‘The g-men have been cracking the usual skulls, netting the usual suspects. Whatever’s happening out there on the streets, the old-time Carlists are as afraid of it as we are. Their leaders have been disappearing, at least, all the ones who have been opposing the new generation of rabble-rousers. The river police have been pulling the corpses of Carlist committeemen out of the Gambleflowers for a year now.’

‘You have a target in mind for the Special Guard?’

Hoggstone sounded frustrated. ‘This isn’t a Cassarabian bandit sheikh or a royalist pirate flotilla you can smash for the state – this needs subtlety.’

‘I can rip plate metal apart with my bare hands,’ Flare pointed out. ‘Rifle charges bounce off me and my skin can blunt a fencing foil. I am not sure the Special Guard can do subtlety.’

‘But there are others who can,’ said Hoggstone.

Flare’s eyes narrowed. ‘You are talking of the fey in Hawklam Asylum.’

One of the worldsingers flanking the door moved forward. ‘First Guardian!’

‘Stand back.’ Hoggstone’s voice was raised. ‘Damn your eyes, I do know how the order feel about the things we have contained in Hawklam.’

‘They are there for a reason,’ said the worldsinger. ‘The abominations they have endured have twisted the creatures’ minds far more than their bodies. Those things have as much left in common with beings such as ourselves as we do with an infestation of loft-rot beetles, and, given the chance, they would treat us much the same.’

‘It is their minds which interest me. We do not need many – just a couple with the talent to root out the core of the enemy in our midst.’

‘Soul-sniffers,’ gasped the worldsinger. ‘You believe the order would release soul-sniffers into the world.’

‘The people would not like it,’ advised Flare.

‘I am the people, sir!’ Hoggstone roared. ‘The voice of the

people, for the people. And I will not let the people fall under the spell of a horde of communityist rabble-rousers. I will not have the talent and prosperity of this nation run through a Gideon’s Collar like so much mince through a sausage grinder. I will not!’ Hoggstone slammed his writing desk and thrust a finger towards Captain Flare. ‘You think that if the people see the misshapen human wreckage in Hawklam Asylum the mob might stop worshipping the ground the Guard walk on. Start associating your guardsmen with feybreed abominations rather than the latest damn issue of The Middlesteel Illustrated with a stonecutting of your face grinning on the cover.’

‘It is possible,’ Flare acknowledged.

‘The art of leadership is knowing when the mob’s applause has become a self-destructive echo,’ said Hoggstone. ‘If the choice is the veil being pulled off your perfect persona or the state collapsing into anarchy and mayhem, I’ll choose the former over the latter. But do not worry, we shall keep the feybreed on a short leash and run them only at night. After all, it does not do to scare the voters.’

‘We will need to fashion special torc suits for them,’ said the worldsinger. ‘And organize teams to make sure the abomi nations don’t slip them.’

Hoggstone gestured wearily. ‘Do it, then. We need to know who is behind the unrest and when they intend to act, when they intend to take advantage of their mischief.’

‘As you will.’

‘As the people will, sir. And for the Circle’s sake, put the gag back on the royal pup before you leave the House. I don’t want The Middlesteel Illustrated running a story on him being seen naked within parliament’s walls.’

Chapter Six

Ver’fey tapped Molly with one of her manipulator limbs, the short one under her big bone-sword arm. ‘Molly, we’re being followed.’ The craynarbian had never seen a creeper or vine in Liongeli, but she still had her jungle senses.

‘From where?’

‘As we turned off Watercourse Avenue.’

Molly swore to herself. They had set watchers outside the poorhouse then. Damn her family. It was one thing to know from your earliest years you had never been wanted, cast out like the previous night’s garbage. It was quite another to have your own blood trying to tidy up loose ends by slitting your throat. ‘How many?’

‘Two men.’

Molly pondered their options. ‘If it is me they want and they’ve clocked me, their numbers won’t stay at two for long. The gang that did for Rachael and the house will be swarming over Sun Gate.’

Ver’fey gestured off the street with her bone-sword. ‘We could play alley-dodge, then slice them good.’

Molly shook her head. ‘You’re a game bird, Ver-Ver, but the two of us are no match for a crew of professional toppers. End of the street, you jump left for Shell Town, I’ll cut right and lose them in the Angel’s Crust.’

Ver’fey made a noise of disgust. Like all her kind, she would only be seen dead in a jinn house – quite literally. The only effects the pink-coloured drink had on craynarbians were to make them vomit and to slow their hearts to a dangerously low palpitation.

‘Luck to us,’ said Ver’fey.

‘You blooming well look after yourself, Ver-Ver,’ said Molly.

They got to the end of the street and Molly lunged right and up Shambles Lane, the sound of Ver’fey’s heavy, shell-covered body clattering the opposite way fading as she found the narrow corridors of the Pinchfield rookeries. The Angel’s Crust was up the Shambles and on the left, a three-storey temple to Middlesteel’s sinners; the low-rent equivalent of Fairborn and Jarndyce. Two floors of drunken loutish revelry with bedrooms on the third floor, where women with low necklines and even lower morals plied Middlesteel’s oldest trade.

As she sprinted for the bright yellow light of the place, Molly caught a glimpse of two shadows racing after her. Even as she cursed, part of her was glad they had left Ver’fey to escape; the craynarbian girl could move fast over a short distance, but her armour made her a poor bet for a marathon chase. This was confirmation. Someone wanted Molly dead. Very badly indeed.

Molly hurdled a clump of collapsed snoring drinkers and hurtled through the doorless entrance. She blundered into a drinker, spraying jinn over the sawdust on the floor.

‘Crushers,’ Molly yelled like a banshee. ‘Get out – it’s a raid. Ham Street bawdy.’

The ground floor erupted in confusion as chairs wrenched back and the surge for the exits started. If there was an honest man or woman drinking or conducting business in the Angel’s Crust, they were here by mistake. Like many of the girls at the Sun Gate workhouse, Molly had earned pennies in the evening moonlighting as a watch girl at the Angel.

A pistol charge rang out by the door and something pinged off one of the roof beams, followed by a swell of uproar and even more confusion. Her two pursuers were in the taproom and Molly dived low, riding and hiding in the panicked flow of the crowd. One of the barkeeps shoved past her clutching an old black blunderbuss. She went under the bar and darted through to the cellar, racing around walls of piled oak jinn barrels, each burned with the red marque of its Cassarabian exporter.

Thank the Circle. The old staff chute was still there, behind a tattered cloth curtain. Their backdoor if a rival flash mob decided to move in on the Angel. Molly was careful to leave the cloth in place as she shoved off down the short slide, landing in a puddle of grimy water and rotting bottle corks at the foot of the tumbledown rookeries beyond.

The maze of corridors changed all the time as the inhabitants added new doorways or closed off collapsed tenements. Little chance of them catching her now. She navigated the claustrophobic streets towards the back end of the Guardian Rathbone atmospheric. Molly smelt it before she saw it; two columns of large stacks pouring dark coal smoke into the sky, keeping the atmospheric’s tunnels in vacuum.

Guardian Rathbone station was a castle of white marble stained black with soot, arched domes of glass and girders crisscrossing the passenger concourse. It was thought to be one of the most magnificent stations on the atmospheric – rivalling Guardian Fairfax station out by the palace, perhaps even Guardian Kelvin station across from the House of Guardians. It would be dangerous now, though; too late for Molly to work the mob of Sun Gate clerks going home as camouflage; just a few revellers belatedly leaving the respectable cafes and salons along Goldhair Park.

Three steammen were cleaning the concourse, collecting rubbish and polishing the mosaic of the Battle of Clawfoot Moor, the scene of parliament’s final victory in the civil war. Molly had to get out of here fast. The atmospheric was too obvious an escape route. She checked her money. A penny short of the cheapest journey on the atmospheric. Damn. If she had realized earlier she could have dipped someone’s wallet back at the Angel’s Crust.

At the end of the station two figures in dark jackets walked onto the concourse. Molly danced into the shadow cast by one of the steammen, an iron skip on short stubby legs. No chance now to vault the ticket rail and make a dash for the underground platforms – the two bruisers would clock her. Of course, they might be innocent, watchmen for one of the Sun Gate towers. Sneaking a peek over the iron box, Molly saw they had split up and were drifting through the sparse queue of passengers, sweeping the hall in a precise pattern. Not so innocent, then.

She went over the side of the iron skip, sliding into sacks of litter. The head of the steamman swivelled around to regard her. ‘Ho, little softbody. What are you doing in my collection of gewgaws?’

‘Quietly with your speaking tube,’ Molly pleaded. ‘Two men are searching for me. They mean me harm.’

An iron eye-cover blinked over the steamman’s vision glass in surprise. ‘Harm, you say? That will not do.’

‘They’ll do for me, unless you quiet down.’

The volume of the steamman’s voicebox dropped to a whisper. ‘I believe you are known to me, little softbody.’

‘Not in this life,’ said Molly. ‘There weren’t any steammen in the Sun Gate poorhouse.’

The steamman had started moving its eight stubby legs, a wheel at its front directing them, jiggling her across the public space. ‘The people of the metal do not abandon our brothers to the workhouse, that is not the way of our kind.’

‘I need to get to the undercity. Can you take me down into the atmospheric?’

‘There is a high level of physical danger in the undercity,’ said the steamman. ‘The rules of community are not adhered to below.’

‘I know it’s an outlaw society,’ hissed Molly. ‘But I haven’t got anywhere else to run to.’

‘Crawl under my sacks,’ commanded the steamman. ‘Your pursuers draw close.’

Molly buried herself under the bags of waste, leaving as small a space to breathe as she dared. She heard a gruff voice asking a passenger if he had seen a missing runaway girl. The thug omitted to mention what Molly was running away from. Then the voice was left behind and the tap, tap, tap of the steamman’s legs on the concourse became the only sound she could hear.

Molly angled her face for a better view out of the skip; the metal bars of a door were being hauled into the ceiling and they were passing into a sooty lift of a size to accommodate the large steamman.

‘Steelbhalah-Waldo has been watching over you. The ones who wish you harm have been left behind.’

Steelbhalah-Waldo indeed, Molly thought. Her rescuer spoke of the religion of Gear-gi-ju. The steammen worshipped their ancestors and a pantheon of machine-spirits, sacrificing high-grade boiler coke and burning oil from their own valves and gears.

Molly crawled out from under the piled sacks. ‘Thank you for your help, old steamer. I think you may have just saved my life.’

‘My known name is Slowcogs,’ said the steamman. ‘You may call me by my known name.’

Molly nodded. Slowcogs’ true name would be a blessed serial number known only to himself and the ruler of the machine race, King Steam. That was not for her to know. The old lift started to vibrate as it sank.

‘Can you show me the way to the undercity, Slowcogs? The way to Grimhope.’

‘The way is known to the people of the metal, young soft-body. But it is a path filled with danger. I hesitate to expose you to such risk.’

‘Middlesteel above has become too dangerous for me, Slowcogs. A professional topper has been sent after me and now many of my friends have died because of my presence. There aren’t many places left to run to. I’ll take the risk of Middlesteel below.’

‘So young,’ tutted the old machine. ‘Why do the master-less warriors of your people seek your destruction?’

‘I don’t really know,’ said Molly. ‘I suppose it has something to do with my family. I think one of my kin is trying to remove my rights of inheritance the easy way, by removing me from Middlesteel.’

‘That those who share biological property with you should act in such a way is disgraceful. But all may not be as it seems – there are many sorts of inheritance.’

The lift room opened and they were in a large vaulted chamber facing a row of empty iron skips of the type that made up Slowcogs’ body. With a wrenching sound – like metal being torn – the front of Slowcogs disengaged from the multi-legged skip, leaving it behind like a tortoise abandoning its shell. The new, smaller Slowcogs was as tall as Molly, running on three iron wheels in tricycle formation. ‘Our way lies across the atmospheric platforms. The masterless warriors who seek your life will undoubtedly finish their search above and begin looking for you below.’

‘I’ll be quick,’ Molly promised.

They followed a small gas-lit tunnel, a locked door at the end opening onto Guardian Rathbone station’s main switching hall. In the centre of the cavernous circular hall was a series of interconnected turntables shifting windowless atmospheric capsule trains between lines. Large shunting arms terminating in buffers pushed the atmospheric capsules through leather curtains and into the platform tubes. Molly could hear the drone of the passenger crowd boarding the motorless capsules on the other side of the curtain, then the sucking sound as the capsule was shunted through the rubber airlock and into the line’s sending valve, before being pressure-sped into the vacuum of the atmospheric.

Slowcogs led Molly across the switching hall on a raised walkway, into a smaller maintenance hall where capsules lay stacked like firewood across the repair bays.

‘This is the way to the undercity?’ Molly asked.

‘First we must consult Redrust,’ said Slowcogs. ‘He is the station controller and a Gear-gi-ju master. He will know the safest path.’ They climbed a shaky staircase, coming into a hut overlooking the maintenance bay. Sitting inside watching the hall through a grimy window was a steamman with an oversized head, rubber tubes dangling from his metal skull like beaded hair. Redrust’s speaking tubes were three small flared trumpets just below his neck.

‘Controller,’ said Slowcogs, ‘I have need of your assistance for this young softbody.’

Redrust’s voice echoed out like a wire being scratched across a chalkboard. ‘When do we not need the guidance of those that have passed away on the great pattern, Slowcogs?’

‘I am in particular need today, controller,’ said Molly.

The rubber tubes on his skull jangled as Redrust turned his substantial head to stare at Molly. ‘A particular need, so? Much haste in your words. You would do better to wait a while and contemplate your part in the great pattern.’

‘Events dictate otherwise, old steamer.’

‘So? Let us throw the cogs and see what Gear-gi-ju has to reveal to us this evening, then.’

Slowcogs passed a porcelain cup to the controller, filled with small metalworkings of different sizes. Redrust released a small puddle of dark blood-like oil onto the floor from his valves. Scattering the cogs into the pool, he traced an iron digit through the pile.

‘I see a girl, climbing out of the wreckage of a collapsed tower.’

‘That would be me,’ said Molly.

‘I see shadows. Moving through the city. Deaths. A stalker.’

‘Lots of people die in Middlesteel,’ said Molly.

‘I see your desire to travel into the belly of the ground, escaping the perils that snap at your heels,’ said Redrust.

‘That is my wish, sir,’ said Molly.

‘I see—’ Redrust stopped. ‘Ah, so. Great complexity. Many wheels. You did well to bring this softbody to us, Slowcogs.’

‘She is known to us,’ said Slowcogs.

‘Indeed she is. The gears have turned so far already, and now they have turned to this.’ The controller looked at Molly. ‘What do you see in the cogs, young softbody?’

‘I am no Gear-gi-ju master, controller.’

‘Nevertheless, look into the cogs; feel the pattern with your mind. Tell me what you see there.’

She knelt to look. The smell of the dark oil made Molly dizzy. ‘History. I see history, revolving, turning back into itself.’

Redrust seemed pleased with the answer. ‘I have lived many years. Seen generations of softbodies quicken past on your own wheel, filled with hurry and the hasty ambitions of your fastblood kind – but I have never seen one able to read the cogs.’

‘Remarkable,’ agreed Slowcogs.

‘But not without precedent,’ said Redrust.

‘There’s something else you have seen,’ said Molly. ‘Something you’re not telling me …’

‘That is so,’ said Redrust. ‘Often that which you do not say means as much as that which you do, and sometimes knowing the future can change it. There are things I will not speak of.’

‘You will help me to the undercity then, to Grimhope?’ Molly asked.

‘Sadly, we will,’ the scratched reply sounded from Redrust’s voicebox. ‘Your path and that of our people are tangled together in some way. I only wish we had a hero to accompany you, a champion. But our steammen knights keep inside the borders of the Steammen Free State, and it would take too long to send for such as they.’

‘I shall go, controller,’ said Slowcogs. ‘It was I that found her.’

‘You, Slowcogs?’ A soft wheeze escaped from Redrust’s boiler heart like a laugh. ‘This is a task for young metal. Your design was drafted by King Steam before even my own and I am one of the oldest steammen to serve in the atmospheric.’

‘It is as you say, controller. Our paths are bound together by the great pattern.’

‘You are a poor excuse for a knight, Slowcogs. But let it be so. Old metal guiding a young softbody. Join with me.’

Slowcogs rolled past Molly and a thin crystal rod extended from the controller, slotting into a hole in Slowcogs’ torso. They remained joined for a minute, then Slowcogs disengaged from the crystal arm with a cracking noise.

‘Thank you for your wisdom, controller.’

‘Thank you for your courage, Slowcogs.’

The old steamman took Molly’s hand and they rolled out of the controller’s hut.

‘What did he share with you?’ asked Molly.

‘Such knowledge as we possess of the paths and passages of the undercity,’ said Slowcogs. ‘But the tunnels we must travel change frequently. The outlaws of Grimhope seal caverns off to confuse the political police and the soldiers of Fort Downdirt, and the political police often send in sappers to destroy tunnels. Then there is the stream of earthflow through the ground – the same energies of the leylines that cause floatquakes.’

The mention of the word sent a shiver down Molly’s spine. Whole regions of land shattered by the earth’s forces, ripped out of the ground and sent spiralling into the air, along with any unfortunates unlucky enough to be on the sundered ground. If those caught on rising land were lucky, the newly formed aerial islands would stabilize at a height low enough for RAN airships to rescue the inhabitants. If they were unlucky, they would rise far out of sight, into the airless night, beyond even the reach of RAN aerostats; their icy graves an occasional cloudy shadow passing over the land beneath.

Geomancy was the first duty of the order of worldsingers, tapping and relieving the lethal forces surging below the ground before they coursed into violence and destroyed large swathes of Jackals.

‘Can we get there on foot?’ asked Molly, trying to take her mind off the possibility of a floatquake.

‘The undercity? We must walk part of the way,’ said Slowcogs. ‘The first portion of the journey will be through the atmospheric.’

He rolled up to a small felt-lined service capsule, opening a circular door at the flat rear of the metal plate. Inside lay none of the comforts of the passenger tubes – no velvet-cushioned seats or gas lights; just a small wooden bench at the opposite end of the carriage and leather straps on the wall holding bundles of esoteric-looking tools. Slowcogs entered the carriage after Molly, clanging the door shut and spinning a wheel to lock it.