The Court of the Air

Oliver broke one of his pistols and slipped out a crystal charge, pushing it into the gun and closing it.

‘You won’t hit him from here, man,’ said Hoggstone. ‘The best rifleman in the regiments would be hard pressed to clip the sail with a long gun, let alone hit the rider.’

The clockwork of the hammer mechanism hummed as Oliver tightened his finger around the trigger, shadow images fleeting through his mind; a horse mounting a sand dune in the far distance, its rider spilling off as he fired; a woman sprinting across ice sheets bobbing in a frozen ocean, no more than a far-off silver dot glinting in the sunlight, a single shot lifting her corpse into the glacial waters. Oliver blinked away the waking dreams. ‘Then you had best be quiet, First Guardian.’

He rested the pistol on his left arm, the crack of the glass shell followed by an explosion that echoed off peeling posters for a drink that had not been sold in Middlesteel for a decade. High above a grey dot separated from the sail and plunged towards the ground, the riderless kite deforming and drifting up like a hawk climbing for height.

‘Hard to control one of those things,’ said Oliver. ‘When you’re not harnessed to it.’

‘Well I’ll be jiggered,’ exclaimed Hoggstone, as Oliver ejected the broken glass charge onto the dirt of the lane. ‘You, sir, are quite the shootist.’

‘There are patrols all over the area now,’ said Oliver. ‘Our friend in the sky has done his job.’

‘I know a way,’ said the lookout girl. ‘You follow me.’

Dashing through the tenement halls, the girl found her three charges hard-pressed to keep up with her youthful, eclectic running style, kicking off walls and flowing over fences. Their way became gloomier, down into the cellar levels, passages that were notoriously unsafe. Most were boarded up, others abandoned and empty since the centuries of long Jackelian winters had given way to a milder climate. Deeper still and the stench of sewage rose like bad eggs, making Oliver’s stomach turn.

They ducked through an iron pipe and came out onto a ledge. In front of them brown water cascaded over a steep set of stone steps, a channel below carrying a fast-moving river of rubbish. At the opposite end of the ledge a spiral of rusting stairs led down to a narrow barge moored in the dirty channel. To the barge’s rear a single barrel spilled a tangle of gutta-percha tubes into the liquid like the tentacles of a squid.

‘A blessed gas harvester’s wherry,’ said the commodore.

‘That’s it skipper,’ said the girl. ‘My old ma raised me on the harvesters. Gas burns brighter than oil, don’t you know, for the library of a gentleman or a lady.’

‘You were apprenticed in the trade?’ asked Hoggstone. ‘You know your way around the sewage canals?’

‘I could ride them all the way down to Grimhope if I had a mind to.’

‘I believe the other side of Whineside will do fine,’ said Hoggstone.

The girl started a small expansion engine not much bigger than a kettle and two paddles on the side started to rotate, burning the same gases the wherry harvested. Black cast off and the flat boat pushed through the river of sludge, riding the flow into the foetid darkness. Hoggstone stood on the prow clutching his debating stick, a brooding ferryman awaiting his toll.

‘You could have run,’ said Oliver to the First Guardian. ‘Left for the Catosian League. Tried to mobilize the army from the counties.’

‘I was born in a patcher’s room on the side of a Spouthall pneumatic and I intend to die in a mansion in Sun Gate. As far as I’m concerned the Third Brigade are just a bunch of shifties passing through on the grand tour.’

‘They’ll never stop hunting you.’

Hoggstone looked at Oliver and the commodore. ‘And who in the Circle’s name are you two? You shoot like a devil and pick fights with as many companies of the Third Brigade as they can send at you. Are you deserters from one of the special regiments, duellists, toppers for the flash mob — or just a couple of lunatics escaped from an asylum when the city fell?’

‘Ah now,’ said the commodore. ‘That’s a long and cruel tale in the telling. I’m just an honest fellow whose hopes for a little mortal rest in his autumn years have been spoiled by the wilful tides of fortune.’

‘In my experience honest men do not normally insist upon their virtue. And you, sir, the shootist. You do not wear the tattoos of a worldsinger, and the way you led us around the patrols in the lanes — that speaks of a little wild blood in your veins.’

‘My ankles seem to be soaking in the same wilful tide as that of the commodore,’ said Oliver. ‘They have killed everyone who meant anything to me. So now I am going to kill them — the shifties, the revolution, their filthy ancient gods. All of them. I am going to hold their heads under the tide and see how long it takes for them to drown.’

‘I believe I was right on m’first impression,’ said Hoggstone. ‘You two are escaped lunatics.’

Oliver followed the passage of the prow-mounted gas lamp’s beam, the low roof above their heads opening up into the curve of a large stone pipe. ‘I can feel the wickedness in their souls.’

‘I had a similar talent. I used to be able to feel their votes in my pocket,’ said Hoggstone. He glanced around. ‘This is an old atmospheric. One of the narrow-bore tunnels from the royalist years.’

They drifted out of the tunnel into the remains of a station, the iron bolts on the wall the only sign there had once been a vacuum seal here. Their guide steered the harvester’s wherry alongside a makeshift ladder nailed to the platform drop.

‘End of the line, skipper,’ said the girl. Commodore Black helped her tie the boat up. Hoggstone pulled his heavy bulk up the ladder, tossing his debating stick onto the dusty platform with a rattle. Oliver climbed up as the First Guardian wiped the grime off a mosaic of bricks, bright colours dulled by age.

‘Sceptre,’ said Hoggstone. ‘Sceptre station. This place has been off the atmospheric line for five hundred years or more.’

‘Lass,’ said the commodore. ‘You’ve sailed us too far. If I remember this place from the old maps, we are across the river, on the south side of the Gambleflowers. The old summer palace by the hill.’

‘No skipper,’ said the girl. She walked up to an iron door and began spinning a wheel to open it; the metal did not part like it had last been used when an absolute monarch sat on the throne of Jackals. ‘I have carried you just as far as you needed to go.’

Oliver sensed them too late, reached for his belt guns. A line of men walked out, pistols and longbows aimed at the arrivals on the platform. From the middle of the fighters an old man in a wheelchair pushed himself out. ‘First Guardian, I understand you have been dying to meet me.’

‘Benjamin Carl,’ hissed Hoggstone. ‘Damn your eyes, sir, damn you to hell.’

‘You first, I think,’ said the father of Carlism. ‘Floating through the sewers with all the rest of the Purist garbage, you’ve found your true constituency at last, Hoggstone. Damson and sirs … welcome, welcome to the revolution.’

Captain Flare looked at the guardsman who had come back from the quartermaster’s office, passing the requisitions list across — half the items crossed out — for Bonefire to read. ‘How can there be only half the grain we requested?’

‘Commander, have you seen what it’s like in the city?’ replied the guardsman. ‘Nobody is going to work any more in case they get seized by the brilliant men and passed over for equalization — Circle, nobody is sure if it’s even legal to work. The canals are frozen, the crops are under snow and the Third Brigade has been looting anything in Middlesteel that isn’t nailed down. We’re lucky we got what we did.’

‘We need supplies for the journey south,’ said Bonefire, ‘and more besides while we build our new city.’

‘Quartermaster’s people said we should wait. Greenhall are assigning navvies to break the ice on the waterways — when the Second and Seventh Brigades cross over the border the shifties will be able to help with the work. The Commonshare are working to lower the cursewall; they thought it would be straightforward to take it down, but when they tried to drop it they found the worldsingers who raised the wall have been purged, so now they’re trying to solve their own hexes from the spell books.’

‘That could take months,’ said Flare. ‘Where is the aerostat they promised us?’

‘Problems there too,’ replied the guardsman. ‘There’s a vessel we can use but we’re trying to scare up a merchant crew to fly her.’

‘Merchant? What about the navy, the jack cloudies?’

‘Seems the mutiny at Shadowclock didn’t go as well as was hoped, commander. The fleet had been half- purged, but someone slipped word to the navigators and pilots. When the citadel fell the deck officers had vanished — Tzlayloc’s people have been running aeronauts through the Gideon’s Collar trying to get the survivors to