addition, then. The Court of the Air’s handiwork. Charlotte had a good eye for such abnormalities — often all the difference between stepping on, or avoiding, a slightly out-of-place floor tile and bringing a wall of bars plunging down to trap her inside a vault.
With a low whine, the cable car lifted out of the station and began to climb up the slopes. They passed over regularly spaced terraces and an intricate network of drip irrigation channels, plenty of farm workers in simple cotton shifts moving about the crops — plain room-sized huts for them to rest in or store equipment the only signs of construction on the incline. So where were they being taken? She looked at the Isla Furia below. As they drew higher up the rise, the party could see the landscape falling behind, smaller and smaller. The city inside its walls occupied a square stretch of territory, the hypnotizing uniformity of its hexagonal streets broken in very few places — only by parks or larger buildings — also hexagonal, which had to serve non-residential functions. Everything was constructed from the same white porcelain, reflecting bright sunlight. It stood seven miles across, Nuyok’s transparent streets resembling rivers of glass this high up. Moon-shaped, the crescent of the lake surrounded the city on two sides, the volcano covering a third flank, while the distant jungle could be seen nestling against the remaining boundary. A section of their cable car network branched off and headed down the volcano, entering the distant jungle to the rear of the city. Charlotte could just discern the distant crane heads and docking pylons of an airship yard rising above the jungle, and if she stretched her ears, she imagined she could hear the distant thud of the works.
‘Are you going to sacrifice us at the top, then?’ asked Commodore Black. ‘Is that how the Court obtains its intelligence these days — blood sacrifice?’
‘The Court’s agents have made plenty of sacrifices,’ said Sadly. ‘But they’re normally paid in our blood.’
Lifting them all the way to the summit, the cable car levelled out, the pylon’s chains entering a dark tunnel on the mountainside. It only took a minute to pass through, and on the other side of the darkness they emerged into the interior crater of the volcano. Rather than the bubbling lake of lava Charlotte had been expecting to find, the interior of the crater towered with buildings and massive pipe-works, a series of gantries and girders bridging the interior space. The upper edge of its rocky rim was curved with exhaust vents pumping out smoke in mimicry of a live volcano.
‘There’s your volcano, good captain,’ said Daunt. ‘The discharge from mine works. A celgas mine if I’m not mistaken.’
‘The Court’s greatest secret,’ said Sadly. ‘The only place other than Jackals where a significant vein of the gas has been found. But then we had to lift our aerial city somehow, and the Kingdom’s got its own supply of airship gas sealed too tight for us to tap on a regular basis.’
‘But what about the wicked molten rain, lad?’ said the commodore, astonished he wasn’t facing a live volcano. ‘I’ve anchored seventy miles off this coast and watched magma coming down thick enough to leave a Jackelian ironclad more full of holes than a lump of blessed cheese?’
Sadly pointed to a crown of massive pipes encased in machinery circling the rim of the crater. ‘Your rocks are real enough, but they’re heated in furnaces here and then catapulted out under hyper-pressure. Our lava launchers have got a lot more accurate over the centuries since we landed here. For anyone that survives a bombardment from those, the island’s coastline has concealed dirt-gas flues to choke would-be trespassers.’
‘Bob my soul, but I knew there was something on the island worthy of the efforts you’ve made to discourage visitors,’ said Daunt.
‘You should consider yourself fortunate,’ said Sadly. ‘You may be the first people in history outside our ranks to see this place.’
Charlotte held onto the railing in the cabin as their cable car passed through a forest of girders, elevator belts, hoists, piping, gantries, walkways and ladders suspended across the crater’s heart. Something of such colossal value as celgas was always enough to pique her interest, but stealing bulky airship gas cylinders wasn’t a proposition worth pursuing. That was the beauty of jewels and rare paintings, their portability and resale value. It was just unfortunate the buyers of King Jude’s sceptre only wanted the piece to unleash a horde of starving demons on the world. That was one situation where having the money wouldn’t help.
Coming across the gantries marched steammen — the human-milled variety, rather than citizens of the Steamman Free State. They were a polished copper colour, hulking things seven feet tall with a single rotating transaction-engine drum turning in the middle of each chest. On their back they had twin stacks behind each shoulder blade. Their head units resembled a cuirassier’s helmet, each with three camera-like eyes giving their skulls an insectoid appearance. Some had two arms, but many had multiple limbs — four, five, six or more arms, or tools and cutting equipment serving as appendages.
Sadly noticed where Charlotte was looking. ‘We’ve always relied on automatics on the island. Locals are happy to help out with most things, but they don’t like coming inside the volcano. Old superstitions die hard.’
‘All those years in your gaff,’ said Dick Tull, the bitterness in his voice evident. ‘Me eating that slop you served and taking whatever scraps and tip-offs you tossed my way — and all that time you had all of this behind you.’
Sadly didn’t appear even slightly embarrassed by the subterfuge. ‘A lot more than this, once, Mister Tull. And again, soon. The Court’s far subtler than the sea-bishops. A nudge here, a nudge there, and softly softly catchy monkey. We’ve always operated on the principle that you receive a much easier ride in the great game if your opponent doesn’t realize there’s an opponent sitting in the chair opposite the board.’
‘So it’s true then?’ said Daunt. ‘The Court has a predictive model of society running on its transaction- engines. You really believe you can shape the world’s events to a single plan?’
‘You and your inquisition friends,’ said Sadly, only half a sneer. ‘It would be truer to say we’ve got a backup of the original model running now, says I. What with all that bother during the invasion. The accuracy of the new model will be up to snuff by the time the next Court of the Air is refloated.’
‘You detected the infiltration of the Kingdom off the back of transaction-engine analysis?’ Dick asked, not bothering to hide his surprise.
‘Punch card artists are good for a lot more than working out how much has been paid in taxes and who’s shelled out enough to become a duke this year,’ said Sadly.
The State Protection Board officer looked grey and tired. ‘I’ve got to get out of this bloody game, I really have. I used to think I understood how it operated, how things were done. Instead…’ his voice trailed off.
‘We’re on the same side, really,’ said Sadly. ‘It’s just the Court’s in for the long haul, the long view.’
‘That you are,’ said the commodore. ‘But this government rascal and the likes of poor old Blacky, we haven’t got enough years left apiece to play along, nor the energy remaining to care for the cleverness and cunning wheezes you’ve got turning on your thinking machines’ drums.’
‘I rather think your people have lost sight of the human perspective, good agent,’ said Daunt. ‘For all you’ve tried to do here, protecting the Kingdom, our future’s pivoted on the fate of young Damson Shades and the actions of myself, Boxiron, the commodore and-’
Sadly interrupted. ‘But then, the Court’s not the only one with a plan, eh?’ He looked at Charlotte. Still, Elizica passed no comment to Charlotte. ‘And there’s a thin line between assistance and meddling when it comes to the Court’s calculations.’
Daunt winked at Charlotte. ‘I wonder what side of the line we will be judged as occupying?’
‘So do I,’ sighed Sadly. ‘Like I said before, we’re not the organisation we used to be. Half our lot were listed as dead and missing after the Army of Shadows’ invasion, with the vacancies left filled by greenhorns, agents bought out of retirement and support staff.’
They docked with a large building built into the opposite side of the crater. The commodore was the second to step out of the cable car, following Charlotte. ‘The mill’s been shut down, the labourers laid off, but the clerks in the counting house are still shuffling around their blessed pieces of paper, is it?’
‘We’re in a better state than that,’ said Sadly, but something in the way he said it made Charlotte think that the old u-boat man might be closer to the mark than the agent would prefer.
Sadly led them into the building, through a nest of corridors and stairs, until the smooth rock face of the mountainous volcano replaced the metal walls of the building. Guards in close-fitting leather uniforms checked them before admitting the party any further into the complex. They carried strange-looking rifles with bulbous stocks that caught the commodore’s attention. Sadly explained that they were gas-rifles, capable of firing steel darts at enormous velocities from the rotating drums above their forestock without the need to break the rifle and insert a fresh charge after each shot. They could no doubt maintain a murderously fast rate of fire. Not quite as bulky as
