Outside, the inhabitants of the other cells howled in rage and frustration. Oliver pulled the Whisperer to his feet and gave him one of the dead jailer’s rifles to use as a crutch.

‘I could break their hexes,’ said Oliver, looking at the line of cells.

‘You still planning to lead us to the Promised Land, Oliver? Into the feymist for the Lady of the Lights’ private menagerie?’

Oliver shook his head. ‘She’s gone, Nathaniel. The thing that has replaced her, it is — well, it is not as pleasant.’

‘I told you the time would come when you’d need my help, boy. Glad to see you’ve come around to my way of thinking. You can leave the ones on this floor locked up. Anyone capable of thinking straight has already been taken away by the Special Guard for their land of the free fey. The ones this far down are wild and dangerous.’

‘And you are not?’

‘You tell me, Oliver. You just waded through the blood of a hundred jailers to get to me.’

‘They killed themselves by their choices,’ said Oliver. ‘And I wanted to see why they buried you this deep.’

The Whisperer laughed. ‘You’re going hunting, aren’t you? You crazy bastard. You’re going hunting gods.’

‘That was your plan, was it not?’

‘I just never thought you would agree. The way things have fallen apart in Jackals in the last few weeks, I might have settled for the Lady of the Lights’ troll bridge and the feymist.’

As the Whisperer left the cell his deformed appearance seemed to swell in the air of the asylum corridor, growing stronger as the sorcerous fields that cut him off from the earth’s power, the bones of the earth, were left behind. ‘Now that’s better. They’ll never catch me again, Oliver. I’m not the boy my father sold down the river for the price of a jinn bottle. I have grown in ways they could never imagine.’

Oliver stepped through the ripples in the air, the cell walls flexing and twisting as the Whisperer drew the power of the leylines into his abnormal form. ‘You have your freedom, Nathaniel. Now let’s make sure you have a world left to enjoy it in.’

‘We’ll settle it in the east, boy,’ hissed the Whisperer. ‘Last night I walked the dreams of a thousand steammen. The army of Mechancia is in the field. It was the life metal that cast down the dark gods last time around and there are some extraordinarily ancient scores waiting to be settled.’

Oliver recalled the people of the mountain cities, images from his journey and of Steamswipe blurring with shadow memories of other journeys through the Free State — some as an enemy, hunted down, others as a friend — standing on the deck of an aerostat, the peaks of the mountains lancing out of the clouds.

‘Are you well?’ asked the Whisperer.

‘My head is so full, sometimes it’s difficult to think.’

‘That’s how I first learnt to walk dreams, the nightmares of half the county leaking into my sleep. You have to learn how to use it.’

‘I’ll try, Nathaniel.’

The two of them retraced Oliver’s passage through the dark and dirty asylum corridors, Oliver’s existence sensed by the inhuman beings behind the cursewalls, some pure living fury battering the walls of their cell with their minds, others dark brooding presences, waiting silent and cold like spiders for something to blunder into their web. He could almost see why the order of worldsingers insisted the fey be torced or imprisoned. Some of these feybreed were more like a force of nature, the human part of their minds eaten away by the mist, left in a body half-evolved for the strangeness of a life beyond the feymist curtain; barely conscious of the violence of their existence here in Jackals. Then Oliver remembered that the order had tried to have him committed here; had wanted to pick his mind and body apart, to crack him open like the leftover carcass of a Circleday meal at Seventy Star Hall. His sympathy for the order’s endeavours disappeared.

As they walked the Whisperer’s body started to change, arms sucked inside the mass of his flesh, bubbles of bone flattening out and becoming smooth skin, fur-like hide crawling up his scalp. The Whisperer had vanished and in his place was a tall warrior with short-cropped golden hair, wearing a strangely archaic uniform with a brown pelisse hanging down his left side.

‘I’m still here, Oliver. This is how I would have looked if the feymist had not risen in my village.’ The Whisperer touched his new hair. Even his voice sounded normal now, no longer the sibilant hiss produced by the twisted fey gash that had served him as a mouth. ‘Perception is all in the mind, and thoughts are such a fluid thing.’

‘Your uniform is noticeably out of date.’

‘It’s from the only book I owned before they buried me down in here. Duellists of the Court of Quatershift — it was my most precious possession. My father bought it for me during one of his sober weeks and there weren’t many of those. This uniform is the best, don’t you think?’

‘By far. The Third Brigade will think their king has come back from the grave to punish them for running him through a Gideon’s Collar.’

Snow was drifting in through the open doors of Hawklam’s entrance hall. The Whisperer nodded in satisfaction at the corpses littering the marble floor, his tormenters for decades laid out just as he had always imagined them. Oliver looked down the rocky hill at his horse, waiting beyond the gap in the wrecked cursewall. He was about to point it out, but the Whisperer was distracted. Oliver followed the direction of the fey creature’s gaze. The southern sky was filled with a fleet of aerostats, chequerboard hulls nosing through the almost luminescent snow clouds.

Wind whipped up Hawklam hill and the Whisperer had to shout to be heard. ‘The high fleet has been floated! But by-’

‘-whom?’ said Oliver. His senses extended out, through the rigid hulls, through the canvas gas spheres — into the newly equalized bodies of Jackals’ jack cloudies. Metal-fleshers, bent to Tzlayloc’s will by brilliant men and Quatershiftian officers with button-encrusted pain wands. Liberal doses of nerve fire flaying them for any perceived shirking or reluctance to attend to their orders; a pain more terrible than even the discipline of the RAN’s cat-o’- nine-tails.

Oliver did not need to answer the Whisperer — the whistle of tumbling fire-fins on Middlesteel’s towers and rookeries spoke for the intentions of those who were now masters of Jackals’ great navy, masters of the sky. Flowers of flame blossomed beneath the vessels, pneumatic towers to the south collapsing in clouds of steam as the heat boiled away their stability. Middlesteel was paying the price for its defiance, the ancient guarantor of their freedoms now turned against them to extinguish those same liberties.

‘By damn, they’re emptying their fin bays on Middlesteel,’ said the Whisperer.

‘Not emptying,’ said Oliver, looking to the east. ‘They need to save just enough bombs to stop King Steam’s army.’

The two of them scurried down the hill as Middlesteel burned at their feet.

Chapter Twenty-Five

The Whineside Strangler’s laugh of triumph turned to a howl of pain as a golden nimbus flared up around Molly’s body, the field of darkness surrounding his hands boiling away as his fingers recoiled from her neck.

The second convict entered the chamber on hearing the strangler’s screams and Slowstack headed the man off using his steamman voice. Shards of the Chimecan weapon blew off under the impact of the steamman’s attack, but the convict only staggered back, then extended a fist, tendrils of black energy lashing out and whipping off Slowstack’s chest. Slowstack was knocked over on his tracks, a fizz of dark energy chasing around a tear in his chest hull, exposed crystals black with oil leaking from fibrous pipes as the steamman moaned in agony.

‘Slowstack!’ Molly was caught off guard as the Whineside Strangler threw himself at her golden nimbus, his black field blending in a dance of colours, clawed fingers piercing and trying to penetrate the golden energy swirling around her form.

‘The things I am going to do you,’ snarled the strangler, his words mangled by the fact his tongue had split into two bony mandibles, the smell of burning meat from his throat making Molly want to gag.

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