The Court of the Air

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘You’ve had a lucky escape, laddie,’ said Cudban. ‘Him and his gang of cut-throats are still at your house?’

  Oliver groaned. Uncle Titus. His uncle was at the mercy of a gang of thugs and tricksters. And he had abandoned him to his fate back at Seventy Star Hall. Oliver glanced at the warrant that Cudban was holding, an illustration of Harry Stave looking out at him below a line of blood-code sigils, information that could only be read by a transaction engine, then the warrant’s script. The red lettering leapt out at Oliver. Harry Stave. Escaped execution from Bonegate prison, 1560. A long list of aliases underneath. Two oversized initials at the foot of the page: C.I. – crown immunity if handed in dead.

  Cudban pulled a rifle down from the wall rack, broke the gun and carefully slipped a glass charge into its breach. ‘He got Damson Griggs then, laddie? Murdering wee jigger. Well, he won’t be getting close to the noose this time, not even if he gives himself up.’

  ‘But he let me go,’ said Oliver. ‘He could have killed me too.’

  ‘Ego,’ said the captain from Ham Yard. ‘Not much good leaving a trail of villainy in your wake if the penny dreadfuls blame it on a rival crew.’

  The brigadier lifted a cutlass off the table. ‘Your other constables?’

  ‘One’s at the airship field, the other man’s out towards the dike and the Hundred Locks navigation,’ spat Cudban. ‘By the time I round them up, Stave and his crew could be halfway to Hamblefolk.’

  ‘Not good,’ said the brigadier.

  ‘I told the county we’re running short-handed here,’ said Cudban. ‘Maybe they’ll listen now we’ve finally had a killing.’

  ‘No,’ said the brigadier. ‘I meant not good for you.’

  He thrust the cutlass up and into Cudban’s stomach, twisting it as the sergeant stumbled back, a line of blood spilling from his mouth as he gurgled his last breath. At the same time, Bates’s arm snaked around Oliver’s neck and a fist punched him in the spine, collapsing the boy to his knees.

  ‘It’s a terrible thing,’ said Morgan, watching Cudban’s death throes with a solemn gravitas. ‘when a young man goes fey, killing everyone in his home.’

  His colleague was pressing down on Oliver like a mountain. ‘Then murdering his registration officer.’

  Oliver thrashed on the floor but couldn’t find the purchase to struggle free. The brigadier slipped a thread-thin noose from under his coat. ‘Then the boy hangs himself from a beam in the station-house for the shame of it.’

  The noose looped over, cutting into Oliver’s neck.

  ‘How long, would you wager, captain?’ asked Morgan.

  ‘With his weight?’ said Bates. ‘Three minutes.’

  ‘Not long enough,’ said Morgan. ‘I’d have the boy down as a six-minute thrasher, choking and kicking all the way.’

  ‘Nah. Too skinny.’

  ‘A guinea on it, then, captain?’

  ‘Done, you old rascal.’

  Oliver was hauled to his feet and a chair scraped close, the noose thread tossed over a beam.

  ‘Come on, son,’ grinned the brigadier. ‘You do your best and last four minutes for me.’

  As if in a dream, Oliver’s chair was kicked out from underneath him, the cord of his noose biting tight – as if someone was pouring molten metal down his throat. Feet kicking and flogging the air, he tried to scream with pain but could find no voice to do it. Then the floor was slowly rising up to slap into him – were the gates of the underworld opening up underneath his shoes?

 

  A rifle crack and the brigadier was tossed across the room in a haze of blood, the pistol he was reaching for suspended in the air. The other Ham Yard detective was fumbling for something underneath his coat, but Harry Stave was not waiting to reload Cudban’s rifle. Wheels of darkness spun across Oliver’s confused eyes. Harry Stave was moving like a whiplash across the room – surely nobody could move that fast? The cord must have starved his brain of air.

  Bates doubled up as Harry pushed the long rifle’s butt into his stomach, then one step forward and the captain was twisting in the air, a snap as his neck cracked, limp body flopping back down onto the ground.

  Coughing, Oliver pulled at the cord still circled tight around his neck. He looked up and saw the knife quivering in the wall, where it had struck after cutting his noose.

  ‘Uncle Titus?’ Oliver hacked.

  Harry Stave shook his head sadly.

  ‘Oh Circle.’ The enormity of what had happened began to sink in. Three fresh corpses at his feet. Cudban dead. Damson Griggs. His uncle. ‘They tried to kill me.’

  ‘You were just an excuse, old stick. A convenient registered boy to blame the killings on. It was Titus and me they wanted.’

  ‘But they were police?’

  Harry Stave kicked Bates’s body. ‘Maybe. But if they were, they weren’t the kind of crushers you’ll find cluttering up Ham Yard.’

  Stave raised a finger to his lips as Oliver tried to speak. ‘I killed two back at Seventy Star Hall, Oliver. Two here. Questions later. We have to leave now.’

  Everything was upside down. The police were killing people. A murderer was protecting him. Everyone he had half a care for in Hundred Locks was gone. As if he were sleepwalking, Oliver left the police station, closing the door on a huddle of sprawled corpses.

  Closing the door on his entire life.

  Chapter Five

  Molly’s lessons with Damson Darnay in the poorhouse had never been as intensive as the month of training Lady Emma Fairborn and her tutors supervised. Lessons in etiquette conducted in empty rooms the size of warehouses, only the silent black-clad presence of the house whippers blocking the door for company. Protocol, balance, poise, how to walk, talk, think. The difference between a thrust and a parry – more than you might think. The difference between the various factions in the House of Guardians: Heartlanders, Purists, Levellers, Roarers, and Circleans – less than you might think.

  Not yet allowed to roam the large mansion and its high-walled grounds – including a small boating lake – Molly was confined to a room shared with one of the other girls. An old hand bawdy girl called Justine. An air of expectation and menace hung in the air. Of what would happen to her if she failed to please a tutor, stumbled in front of one of the cold-eyed instructors of dance, philosophy or comportment.

  ‘We’re not a ha’penny tumble around the back of Hulk Square,’ explained Lady Fairborn with a tone of contempt in her voice when Molly had balked at the need to master yet more current affairs. ‘Of the clients who step through the doors of Fairborn and Jarndyce, those that do not directly decide the fate of Jackals will own title to significant parts of its lands and commerce.’

  Molly exhaled in frustration.

  ‘Come, my dear,’ said Lady Fairborn. ‘Don’t play coy with me. I know what it’s like to be brought up in the poorhouse. You think that if you give your body to a boy or a girl, that is all there is to pleasuring them. But that is barely a tenth of being a good lover.’ She tapped her head. ‘The rest is what occurs within this organ.’

  Molly started. ‘You were born in a—’

  ‘I can’t speak for where I was born, Molly. And that is largely irrelevant to where one intends to end up. But yes, like you I was raised in the orphanage wing of a Middlesteel workhouse. Not behind your well-kept walls at Sun Gate, mind, but down in the Jangles, among the city’s rookeries, sewage and human cast-offs.’

  ‘But you have a title…’ said Molly.

  Fairborn laughed. ‘Oh Molly, the most successful whores you’ll find in Middlesteel are down on the floor of the House of Guardians. Which makes my title one of the cheapest purchased in Jackals.’

  Molly seemed lost in thought.

  ‘Your education here, Molly, is not just about facts and where on the table to locate the soupspoon. It’s about seeing the world as it really is. Lifting the veils of hypocrisy and the lies we tell ourselves to get through the day. You still believe that wo
rking here will prove distasteful? An honest answer if you please…’

  Molly nodded.

  ‘That’s because you have been sold a tissue of lies designed to chain you, Molly. Keep you unquestioning in your place, a compliant female and an obedient worker. Your beauty, your raw attraction for men, is a weapon. Use it well and you can achieve as much as I have. Some would have you believe that I am a victim, Molly. But when clients walk through my door, they are nothing but sheep to be shorn of their skin and their wealth. The bargains we strike here are as much an economic transaction as any that occur at a society ball or in front of a Circlist altar.

  ‘The genial pensmen of Dock Street might steal their small amusements by writing my activities into the pages of the penny sheets as the Queen of the Whores, but the only difference between myself and a merchant’s daughter being hawked at a coming-out ball is that I get to name my own price.’ The lady leant over and kissed Molly, her tongue brushing lightly against the girl’s. ‘And unlike those respectable married ladies of Middlesteel, I find greater opportunity for repeat sales.’

  ‘But what about love?’ Molly questioned.

  ‘The greatest lie of them all,’ Fairborn retorted. ‘A biological itch telling you it’s time you started churning out tiny copies of yourself. Weakening your body and ravaging your beauty. Trust me on this; if there was ever a handsome prince waiting for either of us on a horse, he took a wrong turn somewhere. Love is like winter flu, Molly. It soon fades after the season. Better you learn to master it, package it, label it with a price and start building a future for yourself with it.’

  The time had come for Molly to be introduced to her first client. A training patron, as it was euphemistically known, to orientate her in the trade of bawdy girl to the capital’s quality. Justine sat behind Molly on the red velvet bed, combing her hair.

  ‘You’ve nothing to worry about, Molly. I’ve seen your jack and he’s a regular gentleman, dapper as a dandy and old too – his beard is as silver as this here comb.’

  Molly’s voice dripped with sarcasm. ‘Sell him to me some more.’

  ‘Not one of our usuals, but he must have come highly recommended to be here. Besides, an old one is best for the hey-jiggerty. He’ll only last a couple of minutes.’

  Molly shook her head. ‘I can’t do this.’

  ‘You’ve got no choice, Molly. You bail out and you’ll be transferred to housekeeping duties, right up until you go hard down some stairs or get crushed by a falling cabinet. The only way you’ll get out of here is by paying off your contract.’ The girl handed Molly a square of green-coloured gum. ‘Chew this, it’ll take the edge off.’

  Molly gnawed suspiciously at the square. It was almost tasteless, the consistency of wet clay. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Leaaf,’ said Justine.

  Molly nearly choked. ‘That must have cost a guardian’s ransom!’

  ‘Seventy sovereigns an ounce and the scaffold if you’re caught with it. One of the perks for the girls here. How old do you think I am?’

  ‘A couple of years older than me. Eighteen maybe?’

  ‘Thirty-six,’ said Justine proudly. ‘They say there’s caliphs in Cassarabia five hundred years old or more – and they’ll give you the death sentence too, if they catch you smuggling leaaf across the desert and over the border. Not all our patrons are on the right side of the law, Molly.’

  Molly rubbed the clay-like substance between her fingers. Lifelast was its street name. How the life-extending substance was made or grown nobody knew, and the mages of Cassarabia had never indicated whether it came from a rare plant or was something grown in the slave wombs alongside their twisted biologicks.

  ‘I could have bought out my contract sixteen years ago,’ said Justine. ‘But once you’ve had money, it’s hard to go back to having nothing. Lot harder than having stayed poor and never known the difference. And you can’t buy a brick of leaaf across the counter at Gattie and Pierce.’

  A small brass bell jingled and a moment later a large house whipper opened the door.

  ‘This way, sir,’ said Justine, beckoning the client in. She went to take his cane, but the man waved her away. He looked to Molly’s mind like an old artist, his forked silver beard arriving at two sharp points just above a fussily folded cravat.

  ‘I’ll take a moment to catch my breath, if I may,’ said the man. ‘This place has more stairs than the Museum of Natural Philosophy.’

  There was a slight accent to his voice. Not one Molly could place.

  ‘As you asked, this is the new girl, sir,’ said Justine. ‘Although I believe you haven’t been acquainted with any of our other ladies before?’

  ‘Usually my free hours run to tending the orchids in my hothouse or listening to a well performed piece of chamber music,’ said the man. ‘But I believe this is just the girl for me.’

  Justine made to go. ‘Just ring the bell pull when you’re finished, sir. I or one of the other ladies will escort you out down a private passage. No risk of accidentally bumping into another of our gentlemen that way.’

  ‘Yes, I can see how that would be embarrassing,’ said the old man. ‘Although I would prefer it if you would stay a while with Molly and myself.’

  ‘If you would like an extra lady, sir, I can arrange that—’ she stopped puzzled. ‘But I told you this girl was called Magdalene…’

  ‘You misunderstand me, my dear. I do not require an extra girl,’ said the old man. A steel blade snicked out of his cane as he slashed it across Justine’s throat. ‘I require one less witness to have seen my face.’

  Choking on her own blood, Justine stumbled and fell dying towards the green felt bell pull, the one they were to use if a patron ever turned violent. The door exploded open and the house whipper was in the room, a police-issue lead cosh in his ham-sized fist. Molly did not wait to see the bruiser closing on the old man; she was rolling off the velvet sheets, eyes darting around for an exit. The sash window had bars across it; the door was open but blocked by the two men; then her eyes fell on the cold fireplace. She had done smaller vents. Before the Blimber Watts tower breach. The memory of the last time she had crawled through a small space hit her. How could she go back to that?

  There was a hacking noise from the whipper. One of his arms had been severed below the elbow, blood fountaining from the stump. The old man’s cane had split into two blades and they traced a strange almost hypnotic dance in front of the shocked bawdyhouse enforcer.

  Maybe it was the rush of leaaf into her system, maybe it was the realization that she was surely going to die in the next few seconds, but Molly was into the fireplace and up the chimneystack as fast as a fox to its warren. The cold weight of the darkness seemed to slip past her, the air sucking her up, her feet defying gravity as they shimmied weightless from brick to brick, her fingers almost too fat now for the child-sized sweep’s holes. Was that a disappointed tutting below her at the fireplace opening? How long before the old man retraced his steps outside and found her again?

  Air, cold, evening. She was on top of the roof, two storeys up. She recognized the skyline – western Sun Gate; one of the big mansions with its own wooded gardens. She slid down the iron drainpipe, each breath a wheeze and with the superhuman speed she had found the grounds flowed past her body. She vaulted fences, raced around a miniature lake; bang bang her hands slapped the wall. She glanced back – the wall was twice as tall as she was. She couldn’t have jumped that. It had to be the leaaf.

  Who in the Circle’s name had that old man been? No, that was the wrong question. He was a topper – as clear as day, he was one of the kingdom’s professional killers for hire. An assassin. The right question was, why had he come into her room? Was Molly the target? Surely not. Damson Snell and her tub-load of ruined laundry were not about to lay good guineas to see young Molly Templar sliced in half. Had he killed someone in one of the other rooms and wanted to make a clean sweep? But neither she nor Justine had heard or seen a thing that night. And he had know
n Molly’s name when he should not have – and said something about witnesses. Perhaps Justine had been a witness to something she could not be allowed to live to repeat and Molly was the bystander. Surely the killing had not been intended for her?

  Molly could not testify to any crime except the Beadle’s hand out for bribes, and he had taken care of her in his own rotten style by selling her ward papers to Fairborn and Jarndyce. Yet the killer had known her name. Asked for her specifically. That was an expensive way to end a cheap life.

  She was back at the Sun Gate workhouse. Her feet had led her subconsciously to her sad excuse for a home. The hall lantern was off. Everyone would be asleep. She entered the poorhouse with trepidation. Would the Beadle believe her story? With a trail of corpses left behind in Lady Fairborn’s establishment the head of the poorhouse would have no choice. Perhaps Lady Fairborn would cut her losses and throw her out as a Jonah. She had not brought any more luck to the bawdyhouse than she had to the Blimber Watts tower.

  The large double doors to the entrance hall had been left ajar slightly and there was no sign of anyone sitting on the night chair. If the Beadle caught whichever boy or girl it was that had sloped off night duty, they would be for it and no mistake. She turned left and down the rickety wooden stairs to the girls’ dormitory in the basement.

  Strange. It was not past ten yet, only an hour after house curfew; there should have been some cheap tallow candles burning, the orphans reading penny dreadfuls, talking, eating fruit lifted from Magnet Market’s throwaway bins. The room was pitch black, no skylights to the street above. Molly reached for one of the matches and lit a candle.

  Cheap plywood bed frames lay overturned, hemp blankets scattered across the floor. Not just blankets. Molly stood over one of the bundles on the floor, hardly daring to flip the huddle over. She did. Rachael’s cold dead eyes stared back at her.

  ‘Rachael.’ Molly prodded her. ‘Rachael, wake up!’