state, dependent on the rain season for their crops on the slopes, blood sacrifices to hold off the steam storms. Over the centuries they’ve worked for us, intermarried with our staff. Agents that survive our calling often as not come here to retire.’
‘And now,’ said Daunt, ‘this is all that remains of the Court of the Air?’
‘What do you think we’ve been doing since the great war with the Army of Shadows, sitting on our arses and gossiping about the good old days?’ said Sadly. ‘We’re rebuilding the Court in the marshalling yards beyond the city, making ready to refloat a new aerial city. Recruiting agents, finding the wolftakers that were scattered across the continent and bringing them back into the fold.’
‘Did you ever think that the Kingdom doesn’t need you anymore?’ said the commodore. ‘All your tricks and sly ways. The conniving legacy of Isambard Kirkhill.’
The badinage hurled against his employer cut no ice with Sadly. ‘As long as there are wolves to prey on the flock, there’ll be a need for shepherds, say I.’
‘Wolftakers. Well, damn the lot of you,’ spat the commodore.
‘You might as well ask does the Kingdom need a future,’ said Sadly. ‘Do you think the sea-bishops would have got as far as they have done if the Court was still watching above Jackals, protecting the nation? Who would you rely on without us? The State Protection Board, civil servants and badly paid jobsworths like Dick Tull? Don’t make me laugh. I need to report in to my superiors. You’ll stay on board until we send for you.’
‘I trust you will get them to see reason,’ said Daunt.
‘Don’t you worry about that, Mister Daunt. I’m sure my nightmares are just the same as yours since I touched that cursed sceptre.’
‘And Boxiron, good agent?’
‘We’ll take care of him in the Court’s hospital. You just settle down and write me out a nice long list of all the names you saw in the prison camp’s graveyard. I have a feeling there’s a lot of nobles, industrialists and members of the government who are going to go missing in the next few months.’
‘Don’t underestimate the sea-bishops,’ warned Daunt.
‘Don’t underestimate the Court of the Air,’ retorted Sadly. ‘Reduced circumstances or no, this is what we do.’
Holding the Kingdom’s future in the Court’s hands. Well, that was true enough. If Daunt couldn’t protect the sceptre here, keep it out of the sea-bishops’ clutches. There wasn’t going to be a future for any of them.
When the call came to meet Sadly’s superiors in the Court of the Air, Charlotte was happy to be able to leave the submersible’s claustrophobic confines. It was strange to be out in the hot prickly sunshine again, her feet swaying uncertainly on the gangway across to the submarine pens. She used King Jude’s sceptre as a staff, feeling like some fraudulent prophet come visiting this lost tropical island sealed away on the outskirts of the Fire Sea. Between being confined to the tight confines of u-boats and floating through the underwater alien world of the seanore, the experience of solid land and an endless sky combined to make her homesick and unsteady on her feet at the same time.
Boxiron had already passed over this gangway, borne off in a stretcher that looked more like an iron coffin; Jethro Daunt had to be restrained when the locals wouldn’t let the ex-parson accompany the unfortunate steamman to his upgraded medical facilities on the island.
Nestling in the lee of the Isla Furia’s great volcano and encircled by a thick red stone wall, the town of Nuyok was hidden out of sight. Some fourteen metres high, the bulwark concealed all sight of the buildings within. The wall had only been constructed, Sadly had intimated, to protect the citizens of the town from the wildlife of the jungle covering the rest of the island. This would explain its parlous state of repair — cracked and overgrown by ivy in many places, while fishermen and trappers in wide-brimmed straw hats moved slowly and deliberately in the heat across the harbour. Flat-bottomed rafts, cork-lined against the heat and sporting rainbow-coloured sails, shifted across the lake where their submersible had surfaced. At the far end of the lake Charlotte could just see a series of docks controlling access to the Fire Sea beyond, too small for submersibles, but just the right size for the small fishing skiffs.
Complaining about the wicked heat, the commodore groaned with satisfaction as he was helped into the back of a rubber-wheeled cart, the contraption pulled by a pair of man-sized running lizards. Peeling yellow-painted boards rattled as it carried the party towards a looming pair of iron gates on rollers, a partial gap opened in the portal for them to enter. Passing inside, Charlotte had never seen a city looking so ordered. The majority of buildings facing them were five storeys tall, tiered with apartment railings, each surrounded by a stretch of neatly manicured lawns formed from evenly cropped green grass. With hexagonal walls sculpted out of white porcelain glittering in the sunlight, the buildings’ architecture mirrored the streets they were set in, road after road laid out in hexagonal grids. It wasn’t the uniformity of the hexagonal concourses that first grabbed Charlotte’s attention, however. What drew her eyes were the roads, formed out a thick clear acrylic which revealed level after level of subterranean maintenance tunnels, plumbing and pipes. The roads are transparent. Basement levels descended below the walled city as though the whole city was a scaled up model solely constructed to demonstrate the ebbs and flows of its sanitation.
With the flawless white glimmer from the porcelain buildings, the city had the feel of ancient times about the site, as though its inhabitants were living within a grid of oversized antiques. It put Charlotte in mind of a museum exhibition of priceless pottery from which she once liberated a few choice pieces. In contrast to their architecture, the Nuyokians reflected little of the sophistication of the buildings they inhabited. She could believe they had constructed the crumbling wall guarding the town, but the city itself? The people had the air of country bumpkins who had wandered into the place from some small village and finding it uninhabited had decided to stay. Well- tanned, Nuyokians tended the town’s lawns and wandered its hexagonal roads in simple long-shirts that reached down to bare knees or drawstring trousers, others wearing sleeveless cotton tunics with blanket capes and closed- shoulder capes that provided a few garish splashes of colour. They drooped out of their balconies sucking on cuds of brown leaves or occupied themselves on roof gardens in the centre of each building. As Charlotte got closer to the volcano’s slopes, she wondered at how the natives could appear so calm living in the shadow of that monstrosity vomiting out billows of white smoke into the sky. Perhaps it was from prayer? Little cupboard-sized stone temples were scattered outside the entrances of the apartments. Nuyokians busied themselves in supplication to marble statues of a female goddess, the idols kneeling with stone oil-filled lamps lit at their knees — a goddess, Sadly explained, known as the Lady of the Light. Daunt nodded in understanding, explaining that there were similar figures appearing in the mythology of other tribes of the Fire Sea islanders, gods that may have shared a common ancestry with the Nuyokians’ deity.
Approaching the foot of the volcano, Charlotte discovered the hexagonal buildings swelling in size and grandeur, as though this district served as a palace quarter for the city rulers once upon a time. Rolling through large parks and gardens, the party reached a station where a series of cable car lines reached across the slopes above them. The lines passed above hundreds of farm terraces where figures could be observed tending hillside crops of wheat, rice and corn.
Leaving their cart’s driver giving his running lizards a drink of water from a porcelain trough, Charlotte followed Daunt, the commodore and Dick Tull across the station concourse. Sadly led them past an ancient statue of a naked man bearing the skeletal sphere of the world upon his back, the whole thing sealed inside a larger sphere of the same transparent acrylic material that composed the streets.
The commodore indicated the open sliding door of a cable car for Charlotte. ‘Beauty before age, lass. And maybe you can ask that ancient phantom knocking about your noggin to put a good word in with the fire spirits of the Isla Furia to keep us from being cooked into stone casts. What a puzzle we’d make, for some future professor of history to marvel that there were people fool enough to live in the shadow of that ugly heap of magma up there.’
‘I have a feeling that the threat of the volcano has been somewhat overstated,’ said Daunt, looking meaningfully at Sadly.
‘It seems to be puffing away up there as happy as a sailor with a mumbleweed pipe,’ said the commodore. ‘I don’t need to get any closer to observe it. Not after sailing past that graveyard of ships outside.’
Charlotte received nothing from Elizica, not even a feeling of unease; but the volcano’s throat did seem to be simmering away on the summit, billows of white smoke folding over each other and being carried high into the clear blue sky beyond. There wasn’t much about the cable car she boarded to suggest it belonged to the walled town of Nuyok, its sleek lines and glossy surface reminding her of the submersible that had carried them here. A later
