The Court of the Air

By Oliver’s feet the damaged steamman was shaking, blue energy electrifying his juddering body, the unfortunate half-dead knight too close to the maelstrom. Bullets from Third Brigade marksmen passed through Oliver, lacking the match of reality to harm him. Oliver yelled in agony as the shockwave of ethereal energy lashed out, radiating across the fields of Rivermarsh in a blast that hammered over the steammen host, hurling fey guardsmen off their feet, sabres and pistols sent turning through the air. Steammen and Special Guardsmen staggered back to their feet, searching for the cause of the blast.

Something had changed. Hands reached for throats, feeling the pale skin of their windpipes for the first time in years. Their torcs had disappeared, the hexed collars of slavery gone from the Special Guardsmen’s necks. They were free — the freedom that Tzlayloc had promised them and the Commonshare had stolen was their own at last … the freedom to choose, to decide who to fight for. Like hounds that had been beaten by a brutal master they turned on the Quatershiftian line, the startled worldsingers still trying to activate the hexes that would slay the fey before they realized their slaves were no longer melded with the horrendous devices.

The steammen knights seemed as bewildered as the Commonshare’s ranks by the sudden about-turn of the Jackelian feybreed. Oliver watched as a general was hefted skyward on a walking platform. It was Master Saw, his weapon limbs dirtier than they had been in the mountain halls of Mechancia, covered in blood and stack soot. He pointed northwest towards the heart of the Third Brigade’s formations and his hymn voice carried across the armoured heads of the orders militant, the song picked up by voicebox after voicebox. The steammen host veered off and arrowed towards the centre of the Third Brigade’s lines.

‘Our advance is stalled,’ reported the riding officer to Marshal Arinze. ‘The Special Guard have broken their torcs and fight against us.’

Arinze glanced up nervously towards the chequerboard hulls of the fleet drifting uselessly in the wind, the rain of fire-fins replaced by a downpour of dead Quatershiftian marines and officers. A corpse had actually plummeted down onto one of the cannons in front of him, the body’s uniform obviously torn apart by balls from a pressure repeater.

Marshal Arinze tired to indicate to the scout that he should keep his voice down but it was too late. Tzlayloc had heard and stormed over, lifting the soldier from his saddle and crushing his skull as if it were a soft fruit.

‘There will be no retreat,’ Tzlayloc howled, dropping the limp corpse. ‘Victory is ours this day. It is written on the face of the earth.’

With each piece of bad news the leader of the First Committee of Jackals grew larger, as if he was feeding off their despair. He was as tall as an oak tree now, his muscles unnatural and multiplying like the growths of a sickness.

‘It shall be as you say, compatriot chairman,’ said Arinze, staring up at the creature. And to think he had regarded the labyrinthine politics of Quatershiftian revolutionary affairs of state as dangerous. A superstitious dread seized the marshal. It was one thing to call on the help of the deities — how many of his troopers still offered furtive prayers to the sun god while the political officers looked the other way? — but to become a god, that was something else again. Tzlayloc’s obsession was possessing him until it was hard to see where the man began and the Wildcaotyl ended.

‘Prepare the book,’ said Tzlayloc to his retinue of locust priests. ‘The book of Stinghueteotl.’

‘Is Xam-ku strong enough to be called?’ asked one of the priests.

‘I am Xam-ku!’ shouted Tzlayloc. ‘Do you not see how I am swelled by her grace? It is time for the Wildcaotyl to prove their fidelity to the cause. To seal the fate of these mill-master maggots and their Free State lackeys. Not a servant or minor calling, but the great ones — let them walk the halls of Chimeca again with their communityist brethren.’

In the shadow of the command dome, King Steam turned to Coppertracks and his warrior mu-bodies standing sentry. ‘Prepare my war body, the time has come.’

‘The seers have thrown the cogs of Gear-gi-ju, Your Majesty,’ said Coppertracks. ‘The auguries are unclear, poor at best. The Loas are exhausted, many are withdrawing. We feed on light and order and I fear today is a dark day.’

‘Thousands of the people lay deactivate, Coppertracks, in the aberrant snow of our friends’ land. I will not abandon the light. I will not abandon a millennium of harmony and evolution to the laws of superstition and the malicious will of the enemy. I will not ask the knights steammen to support a cause I would not myself fight for. The old enemy prepares to walk our earth again and by the beard of Zaka of the Cylinders, I will meet him.’

The child-like monarch of the Free State watched the slip-thinkers and courtiers fall away as a platform raised him into the heart of his war body. A clatter of steel cage walls enveloped the King. Mu-bodies of a dozen slipthinkers swarmed over his frame, checking the pressure systems, filling the ammunition bins and oiling the joints of numerous fighting arms.

‘Bring me my arms,’ called the King. ‘Bring me my sword and shield.’

It took three knights apiece to carry the sovereign’s weapons to him, his shield made of transparent blue crystal with a rim of spiked metal that crackled with the power electric; his sword as tall as four steammen with a cluster of stubby barrels around the buckler. King Steam’s manipulator arms lifted the ancient weapons away from his retainers, and he tested the air with his blade, the fanned air blowing snow powder across the command post. Their service done, the steammen flowed away from his hull, leaving the monarch to face the mass of the enemy, metal feet juddering the ground as he turned.

Hoggstone and the Jackelian officers came running up to King Steam. ‘Your Majesty, what are you doing? Your place is here, coordinating your army.’

‘First Guardian, I was a warrior before I was a king,’ said the steamman, the spheres of his voicebox shaking in their mounts. ‘And a warrior defends his people.’

Commodore Black turned to Coppertracks as the King thumped away. ‘Sweet Circle! Aliquot Coppertracks, where is the big fellow heading off to?’

‘Where, commodore? I believe he is going to die.’

Oliver found the Whisperer collapsed in the snow, the warrior illusion replaced by the reality of malformed muscles and flesh without form. Of his gypsy sixer there was no sign.

‘Nathaniel?’ asked Oliver. Oliver had to shake the body before the feybreed started to come to.

‘Something pulled the ground from under me,’ hissed the Whisperer. ‘I felt it in the earth, in the bones of the world. It smelled like the Lady of the Lights, but she was stronger, far stronger.’

‘It was not the Lady of the Lights,’ said Oliver.

This was dangerous. The Shadow Bear was making unauthor ized interventions of his own. The thing had become so desperate to finish the job he was designed for, he was tipping the balance in favour of the very forces he was intended to sterilize. He wanted the Wildcaotyl to win the day — to begin the work of birthing their own gods into a realm too small to contain them — to give him his mandate for total war.

‘I told you, she’s been replaced by something else, something fierce and wicked that wants us to fail.’

‘Whatever it is I hurt the bastard thing,’ said the Whisperer. ‘It’s not much good on detail, just like the Lady of the Lights. That is its weakness: you become the detail and it gets confused, like a slipsharp being attacked by a school of shrimp.’

‘Nathaniel,’ said Oliver. ‘If you have been unconscious, just who in the Circle’s name is doing that?’

The Whisperer looked to where Oliver was pointing. The sky was still full of the ghostly lions and ancient warrior-chieftains the fey convict had conjured across the armies’ minds, banshees whipped on the wind and riding the sky underneath the drifting aerostats.

‘Well I will be jiggered,’ hissed the Whisperer. His body rippled and transformed back into the ancient duellist from his storybook.

Oliver remounted and helped the Whisperer onto the back of his saddle when Captain Flare stumbled into sight, his guardsman’s tunic torn to pieces where the steammen knights had tried to pierce him with lance and repeater ball. There was a red weal around his neck where the torc had once been.

He looked at Oliver with a glimmer of recognition, his eyes widening when he noticed the Whisperer. In some way he saw straight through the feybreed’s illusion, his eyes as true as his demigod-like strength. ‘That is fey? Dear Circle, I have never seen a body so changed by the mist that wasn’t killed by it.’

‘You should have spent less time at the palace and visited the lower levels of Hawklam Asylum, pretty boy.’

Oliver touched his neck. ‘No more collars, captain. No more orders.’