The Court of the Air

many people that need hunting down — Guardians, the lords commercial and Circlist council members. The colonies could not begin to appreciate a killer with your unique talents.’

Vauxtion did not look happy, thought Molly. But if he had any doubts the tight-lipped assassin was wise enough not to express them in front of Tzlayloc.

‘There’s an illness inside you, Tzlayloc,’ said Molly. ‘I don’t need the blood of some ancient fighter running through my veins to see it either. You’re one sick scurf.’

‘Such valuable blood it is too,’ said Tzlayloc. He pressed a stone sphere in his throne’s arm and part of the floor began to crunch back, folding as a dais rose up into the artificial crystal light of the cavern. On top of the dais sat a slab-like black cross, a stone surface veined with a network of silver channels. The head of the cross expanded bulb-like into a hollow gem bigger than any jewel Molly had seen before — its crystal walls filled with bubbling blood. Blood that seemed alive, tentacles of it lashing against the walls, struggling to rise up before splashing back down formless into the crimson sea.

Fear held Molly in place, a terror so complete she was paralysed. This gem was all that remained of her distant kinsmen and women; the victims of the Pitt Hill Slayer, their souls and blood intermingled in a tortured scarlet sea of despair.

‘I have a throne for you,’ said Tzlayloc. ‘By my side you will become the sainted mother of our cause, Compatriot Templar.’

‘Leave her be, you jigging abominations,’ shouted the commodore. ‘Lass, lass your poor unlucky blood.’

Tzlayloc laughed. ‘Take this fat idiot of an aristocrat and his war criminal friend back to their cell. Have them both measured for the blessing of equalization. I see no reason why a duke should not toil alongside our brothers and sisters in the armament mills. But do not fret for my young sister’s blood, compatriot duke. She is the last of her kind. Unlike her kith and kin I do not require her carcass to be drained.’

‘What do you require?’ asked Molly, her throat drying up.

‘Your agony, young compatriot. I need your pain to be milked for as long as I can make you last. Your pain will set us all free.’

Oliver’s head cleared to a familiar buzzing, the hum of darting spheres of radiance, miniature stars of intelligence circling her orbit. The Lady of the Lights. He glanced around. His surroundings had frozen — Steamswipe lying nearby shattered on the dirt floor, two men he did not recognize sitting forlornly on their side of the iron bars keeping Oliver and Steamswipe prisoner. Time had stopped, insects frozen in mid-flight around one of the men’s wounds.

‘Oliver,’ said the Observer. ‘Oh my Oliver, what are you doing here? This is not the path you were to follow. Who will lead your people to safety now? You must survive the end of all this, we need you. Your way has become critically fused with the failure of the yin, the way of offence.’

‘I never liked being the fall-back plan,’ growled Oliver. ‘It looks like your favourite knight is exercising that much vaunted free will you claim to value so much.’

‘What is the matter with you, Oliver? There is something else inside you. I can feel it. Your pattern has become corrupted.’

‘Life is full of surprises, isn’t it, mother,’ said Oliver. ‘If you want to stock a breeding zoo to assuage your guilt over writing us off, find someone else to do it. I’ll die fighting here before I set a foot through the feymist curtain again. I belong to the race of man and this realm is my home. I have had enough of running and hiding to last me a lifetime. No more!’

‘So, you’ve worked it out then?’ sighed the Observer.

‘Yes. Your “deal” with my father,’ said Oliver.

‘I needed to experience your existence from your people’s perspective,’ said the Observer. ‘So I left what you might call a shadow of myself here — an echo of that which I am. A mortal shadow. A little too mortal, as it transpired, carrying the urges and passions of your flesh. Things did not end well for her, did they?’

‘You’ve seemed to make the most of your mistakes, mother,’ said Oliver, bitterly.

Oliver knew he should be feeling something for this goddess, some connection; but, oddly, he felt only a void inside his soul. Was it the pistols anaesthetizing him? No. Even if they had never found him, he knew he would feel exactly the same. It was like discovering you had been sired by the gusts of the north wind. You could feel love for a person. But for a concept? What could you ever hope to feel towards a concept?

‘Oliver,’ pleaded the Observer, the desperation evident even on her ethereal face. ‘You’re dooming your kind. You are their last hope for survival. I need your kind to survive, I need you to survive.’

‘Then you should have left a sacred young boy in the realm of the fast-time people,’ said Oliver, ‘and never have taken me to Jackals.’

‘It’s not too late, child. You’re in the hands of the enemy’s servants now and this position is doomed. Soon the last barriers of containment will fall and the enemy will arrive. The Wildcaotyl will want to invite in far worse things. They will want to recommence their terrible scheme to subvert this realm. When that happens the forces that stand behind me will commence the erasure of everything that supports your existence. You can still lead any fey that will follow you to safety.’

‘You do what you feel you have to. Just know that when you try, it won’t only be the darkness beyond the walls of the world you’ll be facing,’ said Oliver.

‘This isn’t you,’ said the Observer. Her body was starting to vibrate, shaking in and out of focus. This was not the smooth fading of recall Oliver had witnessed before. She was changing, her spheres of light pulsing in alarm. She reached out to her lights imploringly. ‘Stop them — I still have time — I must-’

Her form grew larger, changing, a chrysalis becoming a butterfly. Even her lights were mutating, shifting from bright spheres to malevolent clusters of spikes that rotated around their new master in rapid loops. It was like the shadow of a bear given life. No features, just a black mass of biped-shaped darkness. A single red eye like a line slashed across its head turned to look at Oliver and take in the cell, its senses flowing over Oliver and stretching out across thousands of miles in the shavings of a second.

‘You’re it, are you?’ said the Shadow Bear. ‘She’s had a thousand damn years and you are the best she could cobble together. It’s a wonder I wasn’t called in earlier.’

The Observer’s words out on the cold moors echoed in Oliver’s mind. ‘I will be removed, Oliver. No more nails. No more damage limitation. You will be assigned something very dangerous with a very short fuse instead.’

‘The fuse, I presume?’ said Oliver.

The Shadow Bear glared around the cell, but its gaze was extending across nations. ‘What a bloody mess. You haven’t looked after the shop at all, have you?’

Oliver laughed, the strangeness of the sound echoing around the frozen timescape. ‘What in Circle’s name do you know about living in real life?’

‘That’s new,’ said the Shadow Bear. ‘No wonder you spooked her into calling me in, but it’s not nearly enough to save you. Personally speaking, if it was me, I would scurry away down that rat tunnel she laid the last time there was trouble here.’ It pointed an angry finger at Oliver. ‘I was made for this. After you smears of water and meat have royally rogered up, I might even hold off from bringing this place down, just so I can tarry a little with the enemy. It has been a bloody age since I had some fun.’

Oliver thrust his face to within an inch of the featureless silhouette of the Shadow Bear. ‘Best you start burning then, short little fuse. I would imagine you have a lot of things to do.’

The Shadow Bear shook its head in disgust. ‘Man, did she ever go native.’

It vanished like it had never been and time became fluid again.

There were moments when the pain became so intense that it did not even hurt, when the burning fire eating away at Molly’s skin grew hot enough for her suffering to transcend the capacity of her nerves to signal their agony. Those brief interludes of cold calm were disrupted when the cross of stone she was strapped to sensed her ascension and shifted the pattern of pain, making it a line of dancing impaling spikes or the crushing grip of a mountain squeezing her down. It was so clever, the ebony slab. It could sense when her mind was about to shut down and splinter into schizophrenic shards to isolate her from the torrent of suffering. Seconds before her mind collapsed the cross would suddenly turn itself off, leaving her senses drifting in the warm cavern air, nothing to watch but the play of Chimecan lantern crystals as they dimmed and flared with the surges of earthflow.

‘It is said that it can become addictive,’ said Tzlayloc. How long had he been standing there, watching her