the skraypers and other gas creatures, the Court's defences had never been used in anger. From somewhere inside the city a series of small aerostats emerged like angry hornets protecting their nest, then they were past the porthole and there was a thump-thump as they ran into the attacker's fire. A backblast of burning hull fragments bounced off the viewing glass, spinning ribs of hull skeleton windmilling past.
The warder noticed Harry rushing the handcart down the passage at speed. 'Hey!'
'What's the very best way to start a fight with your enemy?' asked Harry.
Running behind the cart, Oliver raised up two fingers. The two fingers he could use to push into an opponent's eyes, blinding them.
'Glad to see your time with me wasn't totally wasted.'
They nearly lost their footing as the corridor tilted, the handcart slipping across the floor with the impact of an explosion. Timlar Preston's restraining straps held him on the flatbed, but Oliver barely managed to escape having his legs crushed by the buggy. There was another explosion inside the Court of the Air. More distant this time, the impact taken by one of the spheres at the far end of the aerial city. The tenor of the klaxons changed, becoming a frantic hoot as Harry redoubled his efforts at dragging the cart forward, Oliver struggling to keep up.
'Will the lifting room to the hangar still be working?' Oliver shouted over the racket.
'Not in a minute's time,' called Harry. 'That's a separation alert.'
'Separation from what?'
'Our transaction-engine chambers have done the maths on trading blows with whatever the jigger that is out there. We're losing.' There was a rattle as a porthole next to them was covered with an iron grille sliding down the outside of the prison sphere. 'The Court of the Air is preparing to separate. Each sphere of the city becomes an independent airship and they scatter.'
Oliver gripped the handcart as the prison sphere began to list in the opposite direction. 'Scatter to where?'
'Damned if I know, this is the first time we've had to do it since I've been with the Court. There'll be a rendezvous point for anyone who makes it out alive.'
'Stop!'
Oliver looked around. It was the warder catching up with them.
'Get him back in his cell.'
'Why?' asked Oliver.
The warder stared at Oliver with contempt.
'He's just a cadet,' apologized Harry, abandoning the cart and moving back down the corridor. 'Wasn't so long ago that I slipped him out of Bonegate Jail to join us.'
The warder grabbed the handles of the handcart, pushing Oliver to the side. 'You think we're going to risk the prison sphere crashing into Jackals with fifty year's worth of captures? If this mob of rascals got out all at once, Jackals would be an anarchy within a year-' His words were interrupted by a muffled crash from down the corridor, followed by the pop of explosive compression. 'We're flushing out all of the prisoners, high category ones first, and they don't come much higher than Timlar Preston.'
Harry's hand slipped over the warder's mouth from behind, silencing him as he thrust a dagger through the man's spine. The warder arched violently and then slumped over Preston's comatose form. 'That's why I need him alive, old stick.'
'You didn't have to do that,' said Oliver.
'You're a fine one to talk. Of course I bleeding did,' said Harry. He pushed the corpse off Timlar Preston's unconscious form. 'Just like I'm going to have to drag him into an empty cell before it's flushed. Half measures won't see our people through today safely.' He snapped a chain of punch cards off the dead warder's belt. 'And he wasn't going to give us the keys to the guards' station if we'd just asked him nicely.'
An acrid burning smell reached Oliver's nose. That wasn't good. Just how badly had the prison sphere been hit? The rattle of explosions outside grew louder. Harry left Oliver to manhandle the prisoner gimbal forward while he slotted a red punchcard key into the guard station's lock. Ducking down to check inside before the armoured door had fully withdrawn into the ceiling, Harry waved his old comrade-in-arms forward. 'Nobody here. They'll all be up top in the main station, trying to work out which one of them has the most flight time on an aerosphere.'
Oliver had nearly gained the door when a series of detonations thunder-cracked in a timed sequence, then the floor veered off from under them, leaving Oliver holding the gimbal with one hand and the door with the other.
Harry staggered to the guard station's entrance and reached out to help pull Timlar Preston's unconscious form inside. 'Unfortunately, right now, I think that would be me.'
Oliver looked up. Those last explosions had been too measured to be part of the battle. Separation! Through an arc of glass in the guard station their perilous state of affairs stood revealed in its true horror. The Court of the Air had split into a hundred separate globes, many trailing smoke and flames, stabilizer rotors being reorientated into flight position, the rubber gangways and sealed corridors that had connected the aerial city drifting down now through the clouds like streamers at a country fair. Some of the spheres' gun ports were still firing, a few surviving airships looping through the carnage, razor prows thrumming uselessly with the power electric – their enemy today no pod of skraypers that could easily be repulsed with a few shocks. The vapour cloud cover generated by the city's vast array of transaction engines had cleared away sufficiently to reveal the passage of the executed prisoners; white trails like spider legs reaching out, thin lines of heated oxygen where the cells' decompression seals had been explosively blown. Every few seconds there was another pop and a new captive would be launched flailing – quickly stilled – into the airless vaults of the upper atmosphere.
Oliver could no longer see the vast hull of the enemy craft, but he could feel the weight of their evil riding the leylines like a mountain balancing on an eruption of magma. Draining Jackals of her ancient lifeforce as they flew, turning the precious power of the land against those that they would conquer. The attacker's vessel was filled with soldier slats similar to the beasts he had slain outside Tock House's walls. He brushed their minds, glimpsing memories of their war craft's construction. It had been built by stripping the mountains of Catosia, levelling them to make a honeycombed cauldron of black rock, minerals sucked out by slug-like things and excreted as a trail of panels and girders in their wake. Oliver pushed past the slats' minds, trying to locate their masters' presence. No, there were only the soldiers of the Army of Shadows inside the citadel. Strange. Oliver recoiled in disgust as he probed their essence. They were foul – it was all he could do to hold back the urge to retch. Greed. Avarice. A stripped-down core of pure selfish loathing for anything outside of the Army of Shadows. Kill. Devour. Breed. All with a fierce, demented energy about them, locking this storm of locusts to their labours with an intensity so driving it burnt Oliver's soul to behold. It had been an age since the slats had fed properly. So many centuries since they'd had a green, fresh land to strip. There was something else, too. Amusement. Amusement at the clumsy collection of locked airships that had made up the Court of the Air – that something so ephemeral and weak and subtle could count itself the guardian of an entire nation. The slats piloting the flying citadel showed their contempt by drawing up the force of the land and reflecting it towards the toy spheres they faced. Great gobs of power flaring out and lighting the floating city up the way children might burn out a hornet's nest for the fun of it. Oh, how they loved to see the hornets burn.
Shaken by a massive impact, the prison sphere's floor dipped out from under Oliver and Harry's feet, leaving them suspended in the air for a second before spilling them back down to the floor. One of the instrument panels blew behind them; a shower of sparks falling over Timlar Preston's body. Harry cursed like a navvy, getting to his feet and struggling to spin a wheel on a hatch in the floor. 'The lifeboat is a tad cramped, but there's room for two if you drop down alongside him.'
Oliver looked at Harry.
'I may be a bastard, but I'm not a coward. This is my battle and I'm not leaving it to a bunch of lousy prison guards on an aerosphere to fight.'
'The Court's finished, Harry.'
'We're never finished. We might be folding this hand of cards on the table, but the great game never ends.'
Oliver dragged Timlar Preston's comatose form towards the lifeboat hatch. How many years had the Court hunted Oliver across the face of Jackals? Fearing him. Fearing the brace of pistols that had been handed down
