The Court of the Air

and pass themselves off as the protectors of Jackals. A position which pays the order handsomely, I assure you.’

‘Sometimes I think about killing myself, captain,’ said Prince Alpheus. ‘Wouldn’t that be a fine thing for the people. I could just step out on that balcony and jump over it in front of them all. That’s about the only freedom I have left. To decide when to die.’

Flare smiled regretfully. He did not point out how hard it was to commit suicide with no arms on your body, with ranks of worldsingers waiting to paralyse any king or queen who attempted to deprive parliament of its sport.

‘Please don’t, Alpheus. We both have our cages and our roles to play. Besides, life has a way of surprising you when you least expect it.’

‘You, captain?’

The Special Guardsman opened the door to the prince’s chamber. ‘Once my life was the quiet of the moors. Leading the sheep out to pasture with each sunrise, the four walls of a flint cottage in Pentshire. That was before the mist came and changed me; the things I have seen with the Special Guard are nothing I could have ever imagined chewing mutton and bread on the hills over Wickmoral.’

Flare turned to go, but Alpheus reached out and touched his cloak. ‘Captain, please. I think I can bear the stonings, but for Circle’s pity, don’t let them take my arms off.’

‘Your Highness, there’s many a slip, between a cup and a lip.’

Ver’fey had to hold Molly back from assaulting the aerostat navigator in the small basket.

‘Mug-hunters, filthy mug-hunters!’

‘Molly.’ Ver’fey struggled with her friend. ‘They’re not after the bounty on your head, really they’re not. I wouldn’t have led mug-hunters down here if all they wanted was to top you.’

‘Let me introduce myself,’ said the navigator. ‘My name is Silas Nickleby and I am interested in the price that is currently on your head among the flash mob. But not, I would point out, for the purpose of collecting your reward for myself or my employer.’

Molly stopped struggling. ‘Your employer?’

‘Dock Street’s finest, Red,’ said Professor Harsh, watching the fracas with casual amusement. ‘The Middlesteel IllustratedNews.’

‘You’re a pensman?’ said Molly. Why would anyone want to write about my life?’

‘If we hadn’t got to you back there, Molly, your part in my story would have been as the latest in a long line of murders I’ve been following for the last six months. I take it you’ve heard of the Pitt Street slayings?’

‘Not many people going up Pitt Hill after dark now,’ said Molly. ‘Of course I’ve heard about the slayer. The papers have been saying it’s some mad Carlist stalker with a grudge against the quality, killing nobs and leaving their bodies in the street with their eyes sliced out.’

‘Not just the great and the good,’ said Nickleby. ‘Although it’s mostly the rich that have been the victims of the slayer. And it’s not just their eyes that have been taken, Molly. All of the victims have been drained of their blood. Every last drop.’

‘You can’t think that wicked old goat back there was the slayer?’ said Molly. ‘He was an aristo himself.’

Professor Harsh laughed. ‘The count might slip a knife in your back for a bag of silver crowns, kid, but he doesn’t work for thrills. Whatever else you can accuse him of, being cheap is not one of them.’

Nickleby passed the rudder mechanism on the expansion engine to the professor. ‘This is my story, Molly. I was one of the first pensmen on the scene of the original Pit Hill murder and I have been covering each new death since. As I’ve been digging around, I keep on uncovering odd little details, things that point to the murders being more organized than the work of a single lunatic. So I’ve been keeping my eyes open for the esoteric, trying to find a connection between those being murdered.’

‘What’s this got to do with me?’ said Molly. ‘I’m not rich. You want to know who set the count on me, you want to look to my family.’

‘That’s what Ver’fey first told me when I tracked her down,’ said Nickleby. ‘And in a way, Molly, it’s true — although I don’t think there’s an inheritance involved. Many of the Pitt Hill Slayer’s victims have had red hair and two of the dead were cousins twice removed, which has led me to suspect there might be some family connection involved.’

‘It isn’t whole families that have been topped,’ said Molly. ‘It’s just the odd nob here and there.’

‘Indeed so,’ said Nickleby. ‘Curious, is it not? Almost as curious as a poorhouse being burned to the ground with a lot of bodies inside that were obviously corpses before the fire even started — and half a mill’s-worth more children missing. Then there’s the workhouse girl with the kind of price on her head that was last seen when King Reuben was hiding in trees from parliament’s men.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Molly, tears misting in her eyes. ‘I never thought I’d say this, but I just want things back the way they were before. I want a nice quiet job in a Handsome Lane laundry, with Circleday off to sit in the people’s library.’

‘I can’t give you that, Molly,’ said Nickleby. ‘But you’re under the newspaper’s protection now, and my own. I can give you the best chance you’re going to get to find out who is behind the Pitt Hill murders and uncover the person who wants you dead.’

The pensman stuck out his hand and Molly briefly hesitated, then shook it.

Professor Harsh laughed. ‘If anyone from his rag comes to you with a piece of paper to sign, you show it to me first, Red. Otherwise you’re going to end up badly illustrated on the cover of a penny dreadful surrounded by twenty axe-wielding toppers and with ginger hair as long as a Special Guard cloak.’

Nickleby flexed his arms, a thin imitation of the professor’s gorilla-sized muscles. ‘Queen of the Sands, as deadly as a viper and as quick as the wind.’

‘Poor as a church mouse and refused tenure at seven of the eight great universities,’ said Harsh. ‘Not much of a story in that.’

Molly left her two rescuers to their banter and stood with Ver’fey, watching the landscape slide by. The first airship flight for both of them. Their pocket aerostat drifted through a series of caverns, some of them empty, some of them covered by the ruins of Chimecan cities, ziggurat buildings overgrown by fungal jungles. They floated up natural chimneys and what might have been air-vents hewn out of the rock, each massive opening taking them a little closer to the surface. After an hour of flight, swaying in the gondola to the rhythm of the airship’s single coughing expansion engine, Molly’s nose was assailed by the foulest of smells. They were sailing above a sea of dark sludge, sliding like cold russet lava beneath them.

‘Break out the heliograph,’ said Professor Harsh. ‘If our friends don’t receive the code they’re liable to assume the worst.’

Nickleby levered open a crate and removed a large gas-fed heliograph, firing its lighting mechanism up. Pulling the heliograph’s handle back and forth, the pensman started signalling down the cavern. A minute later a series of answering flashes blinked from the shadows at the far end of the cavern. As they drew closer, Molly could make out the outline of a squat stone fortress built into the face of the cavern wall.

Nickleby pointed to the huge pipes on either side of the fortress, pumping out the noxious smelling sludge into the underground sea. ‘Fort Downdirt, Molly. The Worshipful Company of Nightsoil Engineers and the last civilized outpost of Jackals down here.’

If anything the stench became worse as they approached the fortress. As their craft got nearer, Molly noticed large ball-mounted cannons were tracking their progress, hoses connecting the guns to tanks of noxious flammable vapours. There were gas-masked figures mounted on tame pecks patrolling the perimeter, long lances tucked behind their saddles. Squatting on top of the walls, bombards loaded with dirt-gas mortar rounds pointed their ugly frogmouths out towards the sea of sewage.

‘Are they expecting trouble?’ Molly asked.

‘War on two fronts,’ said Harsh. ‘The outlaws of Grimhope would love to back up the city’s shit, although the last time they managed that was back in King Jude’s reign. Then you’ve got the sewer scavengers and other misfits in the higher under-city and basement levels who seem to regard Middlesteel’s crap like it’s a precious resource that’s being stolen away from them.’

Their pocket aerostat was drifting towards the stone fortress.

‘Don’t know why they should be bothered,’ said Molly. ‘There’s always more shit in Middlesteel.’