'Run, you fool,' Kyorin pleaded to the policeman. 'You can't-'
'Hey!' The Middlesteel constable had finally noticed that Kyorin was speaking without his lips moving. 'How-?'
The bolt of fire leapt out from the other end of the docks, striking the crusher on his chest. The black patent leather belt that crossed his tunic shredded as the uniform became a conflagration, the silver belt buckle bearing the arms of the Middlesteel police flying past Kyorin's face, tiny drops of molten metal splattering his brown hair.
Kyorin caught the burning police officer's body as he fell back, just enough life left in him to help Kyorin escape – to serve and protect, as the crusher's oath demanded. Resting his hand above the policeman's fluttering eyes, ignoring the smell of burning flesh – so repellent to a plant-eater – Kyorin made the connection to the crusher's forehead with his hand. Swim. How to Swim? I must know! Kyorin was flooded by images – visions that seemed to last hours rather than the solitary second that was passing: the chemical reek of the public baths along Brocroft Street, a stream in a small flint-walled village in Lightshire, fishing rods laid down in the grass while the policeman and his friends launched themselves into the water. The images grew angular and sharp, the constable's brain shutting down as the fatal burns worked their way through the beautiful system of cooperating organs that was his body.
Letting the dead policeman drop, Kyorin sprinted towards the river and launched himself into its cold, enveloping cover as the howls of his pursuers echoed around the docks. Holding his breath, Kyorin kicked under the surface, using his newfound swimming skills, allowing the current to sweep him away as the water boiled where the hunters' recharged weapon furiously steamed the river's surface. But the waters were deep and wide and the sky too dark for the hunters' killing lances of fire to find his heart this night. With the weapon drained, a hail of darts broke the surface, spiralling past Kyorin like stones dropped in the water. Their final act of desperation became a brief flash of elation for Kyorin. He had escaped! As he swam, his hand checked the carefully wrapped bulge in his pocket where the book was, brought from the stationer's cart on Burberry Corner with a coin so realistic the shopkeeper would never realize it had been perfectly counterfeited for the expeditionary party. Back home, that book would have been a death sentence. But here in Middlesteel, well, here it might just be a chance for life.
Kyorin let the currents carry him after the corpse of his compatriot, the poor dead desert nomad, leaving hungry mouths behind on the docks; mouths that would now be considering how best to evade the call of compressed air whistles converging on their position on the docks.
The river took everything, in Middlesteel.
Warder Twelve looked at the new boy, hiding his deep reservations about the quality and judgement of the lad. Why, wondered Warder Twelve, when analysts in the great transaction-engine chambers did not live up to their potential, did the Court of the Air's ruling council always judge that their next career move should be across to the spheres of the aerial city where the Court held its prisoners? Surely the dangerous breed that the Court of the Air removed from circulation in the Kingdom of Jackals warranted more respect than the bored attitude of this new greenhorn. A greenhorn who judged – quite rightly – that duty minding the cells was something of a demotion from modelling the plays and flows of their civilization in the great transaction-engine chambers.
'So, these colours,' said the boy, tapping the card slotted above the armoured cell door. 'They indicate the potential of the prisoner to make trouble?'
'Aye,' said the warden, 'and the care you need to take when interacting with the prisoner. The likelihood they might escape.'
'Escape?' The lad laughed. 'There has never been an escape from the Court of the Air. Not once in five hundred years.'
Warder Twelve winced. This young buck didn't see all the work that went into keeping things that way: the effort, the foiled escapes – many of them just mind games to keep hope alive in the prisoners, to keep their wickedness and ingenuity flowing in streams the Court could control and curtail. It was the curse of being a warder. Nobody noticed when you did your job well; nobody thanked you for decades of trouble-free internment. But let just one rascal escape, why then the rest of the aerial city would be complaining for months about how many staff it took to man the cells, how they did nothing but sit around and play cards out on the prison spheres.
'This is a green-ten,' said the warder, laying a hand on the cell door. 'Green is the lowest level of threat and ten is the lowest level of prisoner intelligence.'
'Ah,' said the lad. 'A politician, then.'
The warder opened a small slot in the door, a slit of one-way glass revealing a man in a faded waistcoat sitting by a desk before a sheaf of papers, reaching over to dip his metal stylus in a pot of ink. Writing memoirs that nobody would ever read – well, nobody except the Court's alienists, as the surgeons of the mind perfected their understanding of the criminal soul.
'Crimes against democracy. This flash fellow used to represent a district down in Middlesteel, until he started using his street gangs to intimidate voters on election day. We disappeared him after he made contact with the flash mob to arrange to have two of his opponents poisoned.'
'He hardly seems worth the effort,' said the boy.
'You think so?' The warder shook his head. Underestimating an opponent. Shocking. Hadn't his tutors knocked any sense into him when he had first been apprenticed into the Court of the Air's service?
The lad fingered the red lever to the left of the door, a wax seal protecting the metal switch, proving it was unbroken and had never been used. 'Decompression throw for the cell?'
'Yes.' Warder Twelve pointed to a bigger lever at the end of the corridor. 'That one up there will flush the whole level, in case there's a mass breakout attempt. Back in the control room we can blow the entire aerosphere and disconnect all corridors into the rest of the city if it cuts up really rough across here.'
'Have you ever had to blow a cell?'
'On my watch?' said the warder. 'Once, seven years back. The science pirate Krook. He had decrypted the transaction-engine lock on his cell and was working on the last of his door bolts. He was a master of mesmerism and had hypnotized the warder walking his level. We killed Krook from upstairs. He left us no choice in the matter.'
The lad nodded. Explosive decompression, a couple of seconds choking in the slipstream of the troposphere, then unconsciousness long before the impact of a mile-high fall from the dizzying height of the Court's levitating city removed his mischief from the face of the world. A fitting fate for an enemy of the state.
The lad looked up at the card above the next armoured door. It was purple, with the numeral one stencilled across it. 'That's the first time I've seen that colour over here.'
'A P1. So, you've a taste for the strong stuff?' noted the warder. 'Do you really want to see who's inside this cell?'
'I-' he hesitated. 'I think so.'
Warder Twelve laid his hand on the viewing slit. 'Then gaze upon Timlar Preston!'
Timlar Preston? But this was just a man, not an ogre. Old and thin, in a cell wallpapered by white sheets, every inch thickly pencilled with formulae and diagrams. He was standing pushed up against a wall – so close you'd think he was trying to draw warmth from the riveted metal, his pencil scratching in ever smaller circles, the writing increasingly tiny now there was hardly any space on the papers left. He turned around to gaze at the viewing slit, a flash of wild eyes and wispy silver hair, then returned to his scribbling.
'He can see us?' asked the lad. 'I was told that the door's cursewalls allowed one-way viewing only?'
'He always knows when we're watching him,' said Warder Twelve. 'Don't ask me how. There's a touch of the fey about him, if you ask me.'
The greenhorn gazed into the cell again. Timlar Preston didn't seem like much, certainly not the man who had nearly destroyed the Kingdom of Jackals during the Two-Year War, the Great War, the foreigner whose weapons had propelled the hell of conflict deep into the Jackelian counties. He was from Quatershift, that much you could see, a dirty shiftie, no honest, round jowls of the Jackelian yeoman for this one; no honest fat from a diet of roast beef, beer and jinn. Thin, wiry, with a proud nose that lent him an hauteur distinctly lacking in his mad scratchings.
'You still think you have what it takes to keep such as he away from our shores?' asked Warder
