from generation to generation of those who had worn the mantle of the Hood-o'the-marsh. The Court. His implacable enemy. More cunning than the crushers from Ham Yard. More persistent than the cavalrymen from the barracks of the New Pattern Army. The Court of the Air had always been there. The unseen eye in the sky. Always watching. Always planning. How would the kingdom see without them? What future could there be without the carefully crafted path the Court was leading them down? Oliver was missing them already. Invisible and invincible no longer – just a collection of mortals tending the civil war's legacy of democracy, blown to the four winds on a motley squadron of high-altitude aerospheres.
Oliver lowered Preston into the lifeboat, a low moan escaping the scientist's lips as he banged his spine on the iron sphere's walls. Preston fell away and Oliver dropped his feet through the hatch. 'What is the enemy going to do next?'
'After they've blinded the realm by taking us out? Well, if it was me, there'd be a right good kicking coming for any Jackelian that tries to stop them invading.'
A tinny voice broke out from a speaking trumpet mounted on the console. 'Station twelve! Station twelve, we've been boarded. All hands to repel boarders on the lower levels. They're beasts; they're-'
Harry sighed and drew out the knife he had used to kill the warder, wiping the blood off on his trousers. 'No rest for the wicked.'
'Be careful. These things are called slats and they're fast and they take a lot of killing. Their throats are their weakest point.'
Harry watched Oliver climb down the lifeboat's ladder. 'You never did say what you wanted Preston for.'
'We're going to build a cannon. One big enough to shoot us to Kaliban.'
'You're-' Harry threw back his head and laughed. 'Well, Timlar Preston's your man, all right.'
Inside the confines of the cramped lifeboat Oliver pushed Preston to one side and slipped his left foot into the sail deployment pedal. 'Stay safe, you old thief.'
'That's what I do best, old stick. Though, from the sound of it, I rather think it's you who's going to need all the luck.'
With a clang the escape hatch shut, Harry spinning its lever tight. He slid the dead warder's master punch card into the console and there was a clacking from the clockwork deployment mechanism as the lifeboat was lowered out of the prison sphere's hull.
'You stay safe too, boy.' Harry pulled the firing lever, the crack of two charges blowing, and the first – and possibly the last – successful prison break in the Court of the Air's history was over.
A slippery clicking noise sounded from outside the warder station and Harry turned to see the flat eyeless skull-plates of the pair of ebony monsters that had tracked his scent along the corridor. Slats, damn slats!
'That was fast work, lads.' Harry showed them his blade. 'Well done. Now, which of you two ugly slime- dripping jiggers wants some first?'
CHAPTER SIX
Commodore Black indicated the sword rack and wiped the fat tears of sweat pouring down his forehead with the towel hanging there. Purity dropped her sabre into the wooden rail and borrowed the towel after the u- boat man had finished with it.
'You've a classic sense of blade work about you, lass. Some might say archaic.'
'Some might say unreliable,' replied Purity. 'This isn't anything to do with me. Until I came here I had never picked up a sword in my life before. If any of the children in the Royal Breeding House were caught fencing with broom handles we would be birched so hard we couldn't sit down for a week.'
'They want to raise sheep to wear parliament's tainted crown,' said the commodore. 'Not lions. Yet you fight as if you've been tutored in the arts of war all of your life.'
'Something's possessed me,' said Purity. 'My madness – whatever you want to call it. Every day it burrows a little deeper within me like a sickness, and it gets harder to tell where I begin and it ends.'
'If madness it is, it's a grand old sort. Your reflexes are getting steadier with each session. Cavalry sabre, fencing foil, debating stick, pistolry, cutlass. There are not many tricks of arms I have left to teach you. Nor, I dare say, any tricks of pugilism that mad strapping uplander Duncan Connor has remaining to pass on to you either. Just remember that the New Pattern Army fights dirty, and that you've your house's honour to carry with you.'
Purity looked around. The corpses of Kyorin's murderers might have been cleared away, but Purity could still feel the slats' lingering malevolence. 'I wish Oliver would come back. He seems to know what I am, to recognize the thing inside me.'
'Let him stay away, now,' pleaded the commodore. 'A day, a week, a month is good and a year would be better still. You've got parliament's warrant sitting on your escaped head to think about. That lad with his wicked brace of pistols draws trouble to him like wasps to a picnic. He goes off to visit the Court of the Air and the whole place comes tumbling down like a pack of cards. I could tell you tales of that lad, Purity Drake, and all the trouble he's got me into before now. Stumbling around the undercity and the sewers of Middlesteel, pursued by vicious killers. Marching across the fields of Rivermarsh while shiftie lancers tried to run my proud chest through with their steel and our own airships rained fin-bombs about my head. If it hadn't been for my quick grasp of military matters directing the armies of the Kingdom of Jackals and the Steammen Free State, why, our nation would be a conquered province of Quatershift and we'd be nodding at each other in the street with a hello compatriot, this, and a how do you do, compatriot, that. Yes, that strange lad you're so keen to see again is fine for getting us into terrible scrapes, but it's old Blacky that everyone has to turn to to get us out of them.'
'I think whatever has been talking to me inside my head has been talking to him, too.'
'Well, I suppose it'd be a blessed release for us if he and Molly did come back early from the House of Guardians, for it'd mean Ben Carl had thrown them out, them and their mad plan for building a cannon to shoot Molly to the moon. I should have made an appointment an hour earlier than theirs, and used the jingle of every medal the First Guardian gave me after the battle of Rivermarsh to convince him to help keep my Molly's precious head safe on the soil of Jackals.'
'How can you say that?' asked Purity. 'You heard what Kyorin said.'
'Ah, the poor blue-skinned traveller. Torn apart and lying bleeding on the floor of Molly's bedroom. He was kind to you and no doubt a fine fellow for all the strange colour of his hide, but I've heard the dying words of a good few souls on my terrible adventures and they rarely make much sense. This wicked Army of Shadows is no doubt from one of the continents north of the polar wastes; I've seen stranger sights than your friend's eyeless monsters in the underwater cities of races such as the gill-necks, and crossed swords with far more wicked creatures in the jungles of Liongeli.'
'Either way,' sighed Purity, 'the Army of Shadows will be here soon enough. The news sheets are full of nothing but our new treaty with Quatershift and the war.'
'The sheep are lying with the wolves now, right enough. And I can think of one shiftie we'd be well rid of to start with.' The commodore pointed towards the window of their library. 'That twitchy devil Timlar Preston, insisting that nothing else but my finest brandies and wines will to do to comfort his genius and lubricate his plans for his damn fool cannon. If there was an agent left to seize the bugger, I would place a notice in the Illustrated's small ads and risk my address to the Court of the Air's rascals in the hope that Timlar Preston wouldn't be sitting in my house come the new day.'
'And in doing so you would be depriving science of one of its greatest minds,' noted Coppertracks, rolling into the courtyard with a couple of his mu-bodies in tow. 'The schematics I have been helping him draft bear as much relation to our current state of gunnery as a child's catapult does to one of your redcoats' rifles.'
'Then perhaps his mad device will be good for lobbing a shell or two towards those slippery-skinned slat creatures in Catosia without me having to get close enough to unload my deck sweeper's eight barrels into their wicked hides.'
