The dead policeman's residual pattern jumped out unbidden again. ‹Lying old rascal.›
There it was. Soldier, like a keeper of the peace – ‹I was a bloody crusher.› – but they acted in rituals of mass aggression between societies, formalized right down to the different colours of the tunics the opposing sides wore to mark their allegiance. ‹War, it's called bloody war.› Ah, Clawfoot Moor was the final battle of the Kingdom of Jackals' civil war between its monarchy and parliament, some six hundred years before. Kyorin's hunters would appreciate this, although he could thank all that was holy that they were not here to do so. The vagrant's memory was so raddled the only battle he could dredge up for his beggary was something he had been taught long ago in school.
So many voices in his mind. Too many voices. Kyorin rubbed his head frantically. 'I just wanted to learn to swim.'
'I can swim,' the vagrant called out from further down the alley.
Kyorin had to focus. Two days of adrenaline-fuelled near escapes, low on sleep, nearly out of counterfeit currency to exchange for fruit from the sellers who wandered the streets of the capital with their trays. He pulled out the book from his pocket, the pages still damp from his escape down the River Gambleflowers. Velocities and Trajectories of Science by Timlar Preston. It had originally been written in Quatershiftian, then translated into Jackelian; not that the language it was written in would have mattered to Kyorin. There was enough detail in the book that he could model the mind of the individual who had written it, feel its uniqueness. Resting his palm on the pages, he reached out.
‹Timlar, can you hear me?›
Far above in the holding spheres of the Court of the Air, Kyorin sensed one of the cells of the aerial city filled with a screech of recognition, the noise muffled from the warders patrolling outside by riveted armour and pulsing curse walls. ‹You have been gone for so long, what happened to you?›
‹I haven't been able to contact you. It hasn't been easy for me,› Kyorin was burning up, running a fever from too much time exposed to the near constant drizzle of the Kingdom of Jackals' capital city. ‹The things I told you about have been hunting me, the masters' servants. My scent is unique in this city and they are nipping at my heels. I can sense them getting closer, even as we speak.›
‹I'm not going mad, am I? You aren't a figment of my id, you're real?›
‹You'll find that out soon enough,› said Kyorin. ‹I wish I were a figment of your imagination, Timlar, I truly do; that all I have warned you about was a fiction.›
‹I thought you might be my own genius, broken free of my imprisonment up here. Coming to remind me of who I was, what I once achieved…›
‹You have a little more to achieve yet, I think,› said Kyorin.
‹I am very nearly finished,› said Timlar Preston.
Kyorin received an image of the Quatershiftian prisoner brandishing his pencil like a sword, ready to sketch out the few missing pieces of the mechanics he needed for his device.
‹The help you have given me, it is amazing. Concepts that I could never-›
‹Merely knowing something is possible, that is often enough to begin the journey,› said Kyorin. ‹And you had been working along the right lines long before I contacted you.›
‹I still have not find a way to stabilize the wave front, though. That is where we always failed back in Quatershift, we always lost focus during the test firings…›
Kyorin listened and began to fill in the gaps. Thank the stars it was he who had survived the masters' hunters, rather than his ignorant desert-born friend swept away by the river. Half an hour later Kyorin was finished, the voice of the man held captive by the Court of the Air fading as the power of Kyorin's weakened body began to wane.
‹That's everything I need. But how will you get me out of here?› Timlar Preston's anxiety was almost overwhelming. ‹No one has ever escaped from the Court of the Air.›
‹I don't know. I will find a way. I must, or we are all finished.›
‹I never wanted to use my skills for war, you know,› sobbed Preston. ‹I nearly became a priest of the Child of Light, once, taking vows for the seminary. I was a pacifist, but the revolutionary government took my wife hostage, my three children. They said I was to dedicate my work to serving the Committee of War or we would all be banished to an organized community.›
‹You deserve better than what happened to you,› said Kyorin.
‹No, the devices I built were used to slaughter countless thousands of innocents during the Two-Year War,› said Preston. ‹Children no different from mine, who just happened to have been born inside the Kingdom of Jackals' borders. I do deserve this. I sacrificed my principles for a mean, personal thing. And what good has it done me? My family have no doubt starved on a widow's pension during my years as a prisoner. Even before the Court of the Air's agents seized me, Quatershift's streets were full of soldiers' wives begging in the streets for food, their children in their laps, babies' arms as thin as shoelaces. The gratitude of our glorious revolution. I helped murder thousands of Jackelians in the Two-Year War and what has happened to my dreams, my nation, my family, as I rot away up here?›
‹Your designs must be used as you once intended,› said Kyorin. ‹And if you once killed thousands, you can now save millions. I must go, we have been in communication with each other for too long. Your mind was not born to safely receive my thoughts over such a duration.›
Far above, Kyorin sensed the Quatershiftian prisoner finally lying down exhausted on his bunk, left to wonder if the voice in his head was indeed his madness snapped free.
Kyorin rested the book down by his side and glanced miserably towards the strip of sky above the alley. He couldn't see the Court of the Air from the ground, so high was the aerial city's station. Wrapped in clouds generated by its steam-driven transaction engines as they modelled the ebb and flow of Jackelian society, in as perfect a simulation as such primitive technology allowed. 'I'll get you out, my new friend. I must, or we are all dead.'
The chequerboard hull of a Royal Aerostatical Navy airship went past, a brief thrum from its engine and then it was gone. For a moment, Kyorin thought its shadow had remained, but it was the shadow of the vagrant looming large above him.
'I'll trade you.'
'Trade me what?' asked Kyorin.
The vagrant pulled out a book from his own jacket pocket, in a better state than the clothes from which it had emerged. 'Lifted this from the stationer's stall at the Guardian Fairfax atmospheric. Finished it now.' He pointed at Kyorin's damp book. 'You finished with that?'
'Yes,' sighed Kyorin. 'I believe I have.'
Kyorin received the book from the vagrant and passed up his own. A sudden suspicion struck him as he saw how the vagrant was looking at the cover of his new book. 'You can't read, can you?'
'No, squire. But there's plenty on the streets around here that can, and they read them for me – Old Man Pew, Barking Billy. The words don't make sense to my eyes, see. Got the reading sickness.' The vagrant sipped another swig from his upland firewater. 'This book any good?'
'It's a philosophical treatise on velocity science and its practical applications as related to gunnery and celestial mechanics. Royal Society Press edition as translated from the original Quatershiftian.'
Belching, the vagrant felt the smog-damp wall of the alley for support. 'Sweet as a nut.'
Kyorin glanced down at the cover of his new book. The Moon Pirates of Trell by Molly Templar. There was a lurid illustration on the front: three explorers in pith helmets clutching lethal-force weapons as they stepped out of a crashed high-altitude airship onto a desert-like moon. Now this was really very promising.
In the road outside the alley a hansom cab had collided with a brewer's wagon and an argument was about to boil over into violence. The crushers would be here any minute. Time to be off before the first police arrived.
As Kyorin walked past the vagrant he quickly stooped down and laid his palm flat on the man's forehead. The vagrant yelled at the terrible flare of burning in his skull as his brain reworked itself into a new pattern.
'Ask Old Man Pew to teach you to read,' said Kyorin. 'I don't think you'll have problems interpreting written words any more.'
Groaning, the vagrant reached for his bottle, trying to gulp the pain away. With an obscene gargle he spat the whisky down onto the mud.
