The Court of the Air

‘Not that. Its twice-jiggered friends!’ said the Whisperer, pointing up towards a cloud of dark spheres plummeting towards them from the firmament. Aerospheres, a rain of aerospheres. The Court of the Air had emerged out of myth; the wolftakers were protecting their flock at last.

Oliver drew his witch-blade as the first wave of Wildcaotyl demons mounted the King’s war body, eager to devour the feybreed who had interrupted their feeding. The Wildcaotyl had been driven into apoplexy by the appearance of the Hexmachina, and now they were boiling towards Oliver and his fey companion.

‘It’s time for Judgement,’ said Oliver.

United with the Hexmachina, Molly Templar felt the battle joined across a myriad levels, the Wildcaotyl immediately trying to subvert her modification of the leylines. They had already been weakened, the enemy starved. She recognized the presence of the strange fey boy from Tzlayloc’s cells. The unnatural barrenness of the earth around them was his doing. He had put a choke hold on the enemy’s windpipe, she could feel the souls of the dead moving uncertainly through the bones of the earth, and with a push of her will she created a puncture for them to escape to where they belonged.

Ignoring the pain of the other operator still burning across the Hexmachina, she pushed back the Wildcaotyl attacks, as if severing the strands of a spider’s web one by one. Memories of the previous conflict between the Wildcaotyl and the seven Hexmachina kept on passing through Molly’s mind, the other operators — the other races — the grasper, the craynarbian, the lashlite, the — she pushed them out, leaving just the memory of Vindex to advise her.

Xam-ku, most powerful deity of the Wildcaotyl pantheon, wrapped itself around her, trying to burn through the Hexmachina’s shields. So, it was still fighting the last war. A millennium of exile had taught the Wildcaotyl nothing. That was their weakness. The perfect order of the hive craved stasis. All end to the bubbling chaotic growth of the tree of life, the world remade in amber in their image.

‹I have learnt,› whispered the Hexmachina. ‹A thousand years of lessons from my lover, a thousand years of progression. Let me show you.›

Molly learnt too. She changed the set of the bones of the world, changed it again and again. Faster and faster. The Wildcaotyl howled as she transformed the great pattern faster than they could adapt to it. Pushing them a little further back into the abyss they had crawled from with each shift.

The thing that did not belong, the dark angel on the corner of Rivermarsh, bayed across inhuman frequencies as it saw its opportunity for total war disappearing before its senses. She — or was it the Hexmachina? — felt a twinge of sympathy for the Shadow Bear. It was intended for only one thing, and what was the point of a bomb that could not explode?

Now the Wildcaotyl strained for their life in this realm — feeling the cold depths of the angleless realm open up behind them — an eternity of hunger, an eternity of waiting, dreaming of nourishment. They flailed desperately, trying to find the souls in the bones of the world, trying to find the life of the land, but the ground around them was barren — it was the young feybreed from the cells, stealing their energy out from underneath their perverted weight on the world.

‹The sword,› whispered Molly.

Oliver ducked underneath the wavering tentacles of one of Tzlayloc’s demons, slicing out with his witch- blade. ‘The shield.’

Weighted cable lines whirled down between Oliver and the Whisperer, three soldiers riding the lines from their aerosphere towards King Steam’s war body.

Nathaniel’s body had changed; he wore the illusion of the incrementals landing around them, a black leather cape and menacing rubber tubes hanging at either side of his hood. Now the Whisperer looked identical to the Court of the Air’s fighting order, but he had plucked an officer’s insignia from their minds for his chest. The soldiers opened fire as they landed, steel boilers strapped on their backs hissing steam as they drew power for their odd- looking guns: thin metal lances connected to rubber belts implanted with crystal shells. No suicide guns these, they fired like a thousand windows being shattered simultaneously, as the shells were pulled through their lances.

They fanned out, firing down into the horde of Wildcaotyl devils trying to scramble up the corpse of King Steam, clouds of rotten flesh and demon-grown blood showering the snow and the side of the collapsed steamman war frame.

In front of them Tzlayloc’s flesh had hived off into a swarm of dark insects, attempting to enclose the golden halo of the Hexmachina, but the Wildcaotyl had entered Jackals too early and the seething mass was tiring, slowing, blinking out of existence as they expended the unholy energy they needed to survive. Jacob Walwyn was growing smaller and smaller, collapsing back into his man-shape as rolls of his giant’s flesh peeled off and cavorted in agony around him, being pushed and assailed from all sides: drained by their fey assailant, impaled on the steammen knights’ battle arms, shot to pieces by the black-clad soldiers landing in their midst. Behind the Wildcaotyl the disciplined lines of the Third Brigade were disintegrating as the aerospheres of the Court hovered over the battlefield, emptying fin-bombs into the shiftie ranks.

Marshal Arinze was shouting orders to his artillery to elevate their cannons, but it was too late. The only aerostats in this battle should have been on his side and the Court of the Air was blowing his batteries apart. His skirmishers were trying to meet the black-clad soldiers that had been dropped down around Rivermarsh, but the troopers were falling to the enemy snipers’ long guns and the impossibly fast rate of fire from the interloper’s weapons.

He was about to give the order to the forward companies to fight a rearguard cover while the rest of the Third Brigade withdrew to Middlesteel — the defensive plan they should have stuck with from the start — when one of the Free State’s advancing gun-boxes found the range of the Quatershiftian general staff. Shells thumped into the hard snowy ground and the issue of whether Arinze’s positions around Middlesteel would hold or not became academic.

On the royal war frame Oliver stood up from the buckled pilot cage. King Steam was deactivate, his body still and empty. Somewhere in Mechancia the seers of the mountain kingdom would be throwing the Gear-gi-ju cogs to locate the steamman child that would be the latest incarnation of their monarch. Across the field Oliver watched the Hexmachina swooping over Tzlayloc’s remaining demons, the golden halo burning their skin, beetles scrambling for the darkness of the cracks.

Oliver glanced across to the enemy lines shrouded in smoke from gun-box fire. The cross that had held the crucified prince was empty! There was no life left in Flare’s body, but his son had disappeared; had one of the Special Guard honoured their commander’s dying wish and rescued the young noble?

At Oliver’s side one of the Court’s warriors pulled down his leather hood, the rubber air tubes dangling around his gloves. It was the disreputable Stave! Somehow Oliver was not surprised. But if this figure was Harry, where was the Whisperer? Nathaniel had disappeared into the confusion of the battle. He had plans, and they did not include the Court of the Air or the worldsingers scooping him up for his cell back in Hawklam.

‘Damson Griggs always said you turned up like a bad penny, Harry.’

‘A bad penny with good timing,’ said Harry. ‘The shifties are being routed.’

‘Looks like they’re retreating back to the deep atmospheric line.’

‘Bloody good luck to them, then, old stick. The incrementals have already paid it a little visit. The only way back home for them now is a long trek to the border and a prayer to their sun god that their worldsingers have found the key to their cursewall.’

‘They’re all going to die, aren’t they?’

Harry shrugged. ‘A message, Oliver. You don’t poke your nose in Jackals’ affairs and expect to keep it on your face.’

‘Your people arranged for the worldsingers who knew how to take down the cursewall to be fingered in the purges, didn’t they? You were never in danger, Harry.’

‘A wall protects both ways, and I was always in danger,’ said Stave. ‘The hunt for us was real. We knew the Court had been infiltrated. The only way for us to find out how wide and deep it went was for me to act as bait. Make the shifties think I knew about their plans and go on the run, see who would come after us. It was far worse than we feared or suspected. The radicals had people in the Court of the Air, in the whistler network, in Ham Yard, in Greenhall, in the regiments and the navy. They called in all their favours to track us down and we followed the chain all the way back.’

‘A few more bodies floating down the Gambleflowers,’ said Oliver. ‘A few more prisoners for the cells of the Court.’