airship gas cylinders, Charlotte had a few acquaintances back in Middlesteel’s criminal underworld that would pay a small fortune to acquire such a weapon. But how to get it off the Isla Furia without getting caught?
There was a chlorine smell about the corridors they passed through. The scent sparked a memory of the public bathing rooms back in the capital — residue from the centuries of celgas mining operations, perhaps. Led into a large chamber, Charlotte saw they were left in front of a raised floor and a series of chairs, behind which curved one of the clear almost magically transparent view screens displaying the smoking vista of the Fire Sea beyond. Only one of the chairs was occupied, a balding man with two patches of wispy white hair clinging behind large ears, staring down on them over a pair of hexagonally framed spectacles. Charlotte had seen enough colleagues sent down in front of the middle court back home to know what this chamber was meant to signify. He cut a lonely figure up on the raised floor, a magistrate with most of his stenographers and court officials missing.
‘This,’ Sadly introduced, ‘is the acting advocate-general of the Court of the Air, Lord Edwin Trabb.’ He bowed towards the seat above. ‘And my lord advocate, these are the group who have been frustrating the schemes of the infiltrators we now know as the sea-bishops. Jethro Daunt, ex of the church, Jared Black, ex of the royalist fleet-in- exile, Dick Tull, ex of the State Protection Board, and Charlotte Shades, ex of the flash mob and the present guardian of King Jude’s sceptre.’
‘The clever, the desperate, the barely competent, and the incorrigibly criminal,’ said Lord Trabb. ‘As strange a group as I’ve had presented before me in a long time.’
‘You can’t have many visitors out here,’ said Charlotte.
‘I believe you’ve seen the hulls of those that do,’ said Lord Trabb. ‘Mounds of hasty trespassers sunk on our doorstep and overgrown with fire coral.’
‘ Acting advocate-general,’ said Daunt. ‘And whom might I inquire are you acting for?’
‘Ah yes, the clever one.’ Lord Trabb pushed his glassed back on his nose. He seemed to enjoy lecturing them. The chamber was starting to feel less like a courtroom and more like a schoolroom. ‘Well, you’ve given our elusive enemy a name and a face, albeit not quite the one we were expecting, so why not? I am acting for Lady Riddle, who was declared missing when the old Court of the Air was destroyed in the invasion. My department was the only one to survive unscathed, so it seemed natural for me to occupy the role. I would declare myself the real thing and dispense with the formalities, but milady Riddle has a disconcerting habit of disappearing and then reappearing when you least expect her.’
‘And your department, good agent?’ said Daunt.
‘Section Six,’ said Trabb. ‘The Service and Engineering Corps.’
The commodore looked unhappy at the news. ‘Ah, that’s a bad turn. We’ve come seeking a way to keep this sceptre out of our wicked foes’ clutches and instead we find grease-stained fingers guiding the tiller, not the skipper’s firm grip.’
‘Come now, I hardly think the desperate one is in a position to cherrypick his allies,’ said Lord Trabb. ‘And by your words you mark yourself out to be a fool. Who better to rebuild the Court of the Air than the very marshalling yards that maintained the old aerial city, the same academy that trained the old agents to teach the new? We have a backup model of the Kingdom’s society running here, the perfect template for the perfect democracy. That is all that matters in the end.’
‘It’ll matter a lot less than you think, lad, when the demons chasing the sceptre turn up in their darkships, wanting to open the gates to their terrible home full of hungry ravening beasts.’
‘I would council against complacency,’ said Daunt. ‘From what we’ve seen, the sea-bishops have fully infiltrated the Advocacy’s leadership. When they come for the sceptre, it will no doubt be at the head of a sizeable gill-neck force.’
‘I had no idea the Circlist church’s remit extended to military matters?’ said Lord Trabb. ‘I rather had the notion you were all pacifists. To kill another is to kill myself and all that synthetic morality cant.’ He waved Daunt’s concerns aside. ‘It is all in the model now. The sea-bishops and their schemes are fully accounted for.’
‘Popinjay!’ Elizica’s words jabbed into Charlotte’s mind. ‘Am I to trust this dusty clerk, this oily-ragged boiler repairer with protecting the sceptre? Knowing of the sea-bishops’ existence is not the same as having won hard experience of fighting them.’
‘Tell me you can protect the sceptre,’ said Charlotte. ‘That you can protect the Kingdom.’
‘My dear, it’s what the Court’s been doing for a lot longer than you’ve been around. The enemy are weak and far from home and dependent on secrecy and their little tricks of illusion to prosper. Now that we know what to look for, we’ll root them out like a gardener clubbing moles with a spade, eh?’
Charlotte began to protest, but the acting head of the Court of the Air cut her off. ‘You will have quarters made available to you in Nuyok below while our analysts follow the repercussions of your new information through our models. The course of action we need to pursue will be arrived at in good time. In the meantime, we will need to test King Jude’s sceptre and see if there is a way to destroy the key-gem, to cut the sea-bishops off from further reinforcements of their race for good. I am having testing facilities prepared and we will send for it shortly.’
Their interview, it seemed, was over, and guards led the party away from the chamber.
‘All my bloody working life,’ Dick said to Sadly. ‘I’ve been raised on tales of how all-seeing and omnipotent the Court of the Air is. Like ghosts in the machine, moving through the shadows and disappearing people before they ever posed a threat. All enemies, foreign and domestic, living in fear of the legendary wolftakers. And this is the bleeding reality? You’re no better than the State Protection Board. Run by blue-blood idiots and leaving dross like me to get the job done right. What’s that slur your people used to call the board’s officers?’
‘The glass men,’ said Sadly. ‘But this isn’t the Court of the Air, Mister Tull. This is just what’s left of it after the Court was destroyed. And it will be rebuilt and refloated again.’
Daunt frowned. ‘Is that likely to happen before the sea-bishops trace the sceptre back to the Isla Furia, good agent?’
‘No.’
‘Then I think we better make some plans of our own,’ added Charlotte. And quickly.
Daunt watched Charlotte lay King Jude’s sceptre down on the table of the roof garden while Commodore Black quickly reached for a bottle of corn whisky Sadly had produced, as if he was worried that the sceptre’s presence might contaminate his drink. ‘A precious drop of the local fire water, that’s what’s needed to lubricate my thinking. For never was there a more dangerous puzzle than how to keep this wicked key-gem out of the clutches of its demon owners.’
It didn’t seem to matter what time of the day it was, wherever you stood on the Isla Furia, you were always accompanied by the sound of the wind whistling. Sometimes it was a soft, gentle breeze. Other times a hard violent force rattling the shutters that stood ready to be lowered over the porcelain towers’ windows. But gentle or hard, the whistling was a constant companion for the people of the city. Where it buffeted the slopes of the volcano, it literally whistled, seeking out the holes in the porous rock and singing through its crevices.
Dick Tull leant back in his chair. ‘We could hoof it out to one of the other great powers — Cassarabia or Pericur, maybe. Someone without much love for the Kingdom or the Advocacy and able to protect the sceptre from both.’
‘Who’s to say their nations won’t be infiltrated, or maybe the caliph and the grand-duchess will just decide to cut a side-deal with the sea-bishops like the royalists have done?’ said Sadly. ‘Don’t trust them, says I.’
‘The sceptre is as safe here as anywhere,’ said Daunt. ‘Which is to say, not very safe at all. And the good agent has a point; at least here we can be assured that the Court of the Air’s best interests are aligned with the Kingdom’s own. On foreign shores we would have no such guarantee. There would be incalculable political variables as well as the threat of the enemy’s darkships arriving to seize the sceptre by force.’ Far too risky.
‘The sceptre is never going to be safe,’ said Charlotte. ‘Someone can always steal it. I proved that.’
‘The time of the sea-bishops exercising caution is over,’ said Daunt. ‘They know their presence here in our world stands revealed now. I believe they will act decisively to seize back the key-gem. They need to open the gate to their home before word of their nature spreads and we locals band together to cast them out, unite to destroy them prior to their numbers swelling.’
‘Just my luck. All those tales of dashing, seductive vampires in the penny-dreadfuls, and when I finally meet them, they turn out to be fish-faced monsters with a head like a bludger’s wedding tackle.’ Charlotte tapped the sceptre thoughtfully. ‘It looks like we’re going to need to split up, then. First, word of the sea-bishops’ return must be spread. Second, the sea-bishops themselves must be confronted and thrown back to hell. Lastly, the sceptre needs to be protected here.’
