The Court of the Air

by Stephen Hunt

  Nickleby and the steamman seemed oblivious to the large submariner’s inexhaustible well of self-pity. Coppertracks continued his work assembling a bank of strange-looking machinery while his drones devoured the crates of reading material.

  The pensman turned by the door. ‘Aliquot, I don’t think that any of the mug-hunters know yet that young Damson Templar is our guest, but in case they do …’

  ‘Mortal Circle,’ wheezed the commodore, stumbling after Molly and Nickleby. ‘Let us not be waking up that metal monster again. Let it rest safe in its slumber.’

  ‘My dear mammal.’ Coppertracks stopped his work and swivelled on one of his tracks. ‘That monster is little more than an extra arm for me to plug into my body; it is a drone, a mu-body driven by my id … to all intents and purposes it is me.’

  ‘Ah, Coppertracks,’ pleaded the commodore, ‘I know your vast intelligence pulls on different bodies like I do a pair of old boots, but that beast you keep in the basement is possessed. It is as wicked as a sand demon.’

  ‘The Steamo Loas only rode it the once and they could have picked any of my bodies,’ said Coppertracks. He turned to Nickleby. ‘Fire up its boiler for me, Silas softbody. I shall stand sentry outside Tock House tonight.’

  Two levels of chambers and junk rooms lay underneath the tower of Tock House. Molly and Nickleby navigated a narrow trail through piled curios and junk. There were globes of the world, many of the continents left a speculative solid yellow for the unknown, oil portraits of Guardians and guild officials, orreries of the twenty planets of the solar system, their celestial motion stilled by rusty clockwork; and more recent additions to the junk – piled daguerreotype prints taken by a real-box.

  Unlike the staid upright family shots that graced the windows of fashionable real-box artists, these monochrome prints were of Middlesteel itself. Nagcross Bridge at sunrise, a few lonely milk carts setting out from their depot, the masts of wherries sailing the Gambleflowers rising like trees beyond. The massive bell house of Brute Julius rising out of the House of Guardians, ready to ring each afternoon as parliament began sitting. A child at Cradledon aerostat field, her face wide in wonder at the merchant marine airships poised in a long line down the horizon. Behind the daguerreotype images stood a real-box on its tripod, the sad nose of the lens pointed at the dusty flagstones.

  Nickleby saw Molly looking at the card-mounted images. ‘They are mine, Molly.’

  ‘I haven’t seen anything like them,’ said Molly. ‘You could make a living just selling them.’

  ‘I did once,’ said the pensman. ‘As well as writing for The Illustrated, I used to take real-box pictures for the newspapers.’

  ‘Used to? What happened?’

  ‘A mixture of the personal and the practical, Molly. I ran out of images I wanted to capture, and then the illustrators’ combination lobbied parliament to ban the use of daguerreotypes in printed publications. They said the images could be used in a bawdy and lewd manner and pointed to the sleazier end of Dock Street to make their point. These days the only place I could sell my real-box work would be to the underground press – Carlist flysheets, political pamphlets and issues of Damsons’ Relish.’

  Molly could tell there was something more that Nickleby was not telling her, but they were soon at the end of the chamber and into a second hall, this one filled with furniture and curios left by a previous owner; wooden mannequins wearing armour from foreign lands and earlier times.

  Small wonder the present owners had hidden the figures out of sight; it was as if Molly and the pensman stood surrounded by a legion of spectres. There was plate armour from the old royalist army, spiked steel chest-pieces and beaked helmets with holes on either side for rubber gas-mask tubes long since rotted away. There were Cassarabian sand rider uniforms – brittle leather skins with more lace ties than a ball gown and head masks of thin metal gauze capable of filtering a hundred-mile-an-hour desert storm. There were quilted gutta-percha guardsmen jackets from Catosia, ridiculously oversized to accommodate the shine-swelled muscles of their pectorals and latissimus dorsi.

  In between the animal skins of a couple of Liongeli tribesmen stood what Molly had first taken for powered duelling armour – towering above its companions – but as Nickleby approached it, Molly realized that there was no manikin underneath. This was one of Coppertracks’ spare bodies, the steamman’s dark alter ego that had sent the commodore scurrying for the comfort of the pantry. Nickleby slid a couple of bricks of compressed high-grade coke into the steamman’s armoured furnace loader and flicked the ignition switch on the oil reservoir.

  With a rattle of its iron arms the body started to wake. Four centaur-like legs began to piston the steamman higher, the creature turning its square head to scan them.

  ‘Aliquot, can you hear me?’ asked Nickleby.

  ‘Yes,’ answered the metal centaur. Filtered through the voicebox of this brute, Coppertracks’ consciousness had none of the scholarly inflexions or distracted airs of the slipthinker Molly had met in the tower above. This was a killing machine and nothing else. Two manipulator arms flexed their metal fingers, while above, two long fighting arms – segmented javelins – swung in a testing arc.

  ‘Upstairs, then,’ said Nickleby.

  ‘Patrol, guard, protect,’ said the steamman.

  ‘Sharparms is a poor conversationalist,’ said Nickleby to Molly. ‘King Steam would not offend the knights steammen by giving the slipthinkers mu-bodies with minds capable of strategy and war arts – it is Coppertracks’ job to supply the brains.’

  ‘Mister Black doesn’t like him,’ said Molly.

  ‘Submariners are a superstitious lot,’ said Nickleby. ‘The commodore had a bit of a fright when one of the Loas possessed Sharparms on the Isla Needless. But whether being ridden by the spirits or not, you can rely on Coppertracks’ bodies to keep us safe at Tock House.’

  * * *

  Molly’s sleep was not made any easier by the lush depths of her mattress or the round goose-feather pillows scattered across the four-poster bed. Every time she started to fall asleep she woke up with a start, convinced someone was in the room with her. Now it was night she could hear the mechanism of the clock two storeys above, the slow processions of the hands, and every couple of minutes a thud and a clack interrupting the gargle of the tower’s water and heating pipes. Cursing herself for a fool, she kicked the blanket off her body and dipped her feet down for her shoes.

  There was a bathroom at the end of the corridor; perhaps a glass of water would settle her insomnia. She needed no lantern; the corridor was fitted with miniature chandelier clusters, pressure fed with slipsharp oil and ignited by a clockwork timer. The whole house seemed a faddish monument to machine-time, the clock tower imposing its artificial order on the passage of the day, splitting it neatly into minutes and hours – switching the lights on for darkness and dimming them for dawn.

  Yawning, Molly turned and saw a figure at the end of the corridor – it looked like a child. But … someone familiar. Her heart turned cold. She did know her. She was the girl from Silver Onestack’s visions, painted by the steamman across hundreds of canvas illustrations. Had the girl disappeared from Onestack’s dreams when Molly fixed the steamman’s broken vision plate? Was she looking for a new host to haunt?

  A keening moan sounded and it took every ounce of courage Molly possessed not to break and flee screaming. The girl pointed out of the window into the night beyond – the moaning was coming from the garden, not the girl at all. A cough from one of the bedrooms distracted Molly for a second; someone else was waking up in the house. Molly glanced back. The apparition had vanished. Walking forward, she pressed her face against the cold glass, staring down onto the lawn.

  Sharparms was standing sentry like a stone lion in front of Tock House, while stumbling across the grass was Nickleby. The pensman was the source of the animal-like cry, his arms raised in supplication to the heavens. In his right hand he held a crystal glass hookah, mumbleweed smoke risi
ng from its mouth pipe like green mist into the cool night air. Following in his wake were two of Coppertracks’ iron goblins, the drones trying to convince the journalist to return to the warmth of the house, dragging and clutching at his bed robes.

  A hand rested itself on Molly’s shoulder and she yelped, jumping back.

  ‘Molly, it is only me,’ said the commodore. ‘So you’ve been woken up by the noise too.’

  ‘What’s going on down there? Silas is dancing around on the grass, half out of his mind by the looks of it.’

  ‘Leaafed again. That’s too bad, poor Silas. A little puff of the weed can settle a person down for the night and ward off bad dreams, but he smokes too blessed much, reaching for oblivion in the southern fashion.’

  Nickleby had half collapsed on the grass and Coppertracks’ diminutive servants were trying to prop him up, their birdlike iron feet trampling the liquid the hookah had spilled across the lawn. In his horseless carriage, on the pocket aerostat, Molly suddenly realized that the pensman had never seemed to be too far away from his mumbleweed pipe.

  ‘Leaafed for a ha’penny, dead leaafed for two,’ said Molly, repeating the old jinn-house adage.

  ‘Ah, Molly,’ said Black. ‘You don’t know what that man has seen. The horrors.’

  ‘You mean the Pitt Street slayings?’

  ‘Not them, lass, though I don’t doubt that would turn a person’s stomach, those poor dead wretches – no, I mean his days in the war.’

  ‘Against Quatérshift?’ said Molly. ‘He said he’d been in the navy, but flying an ink blotter – I thought he was writing propaganda for Greenhall or something.’

  ‘He was in the sharp crew, Molly. All the clever-clever types from the eight great universities, the order, the military. Strategy, mind games and black sorcery. Silas was one of the best, a real-box master and a creative thinker. They were running some grand scams, so they were – cracking Commonshare codes with the great machines at Greenhall, writing forged letters to families back in Quatérshift from prisoners that had died at the front. Telling the shifties how well they were being treated in Jackals, what beasts the Committee’s officers were – all the atrocities they were forced to commit. Silas was as good at faking daguerreotypes as he was at taking real-box pictures in the first place.

  ‘The sharp crew would fake daguerreotypes of the First Committee throwing banquets with naked bawdy girls on the table as dessert, Dock Street would print them up, and then our aerostats would drop them on the front line. Imagine, lass, if you were a Carlist soldier stuck in the mud at Drinnais while you knew your family were half-starving back in the fields, then you got to see your leaders living high on the hog and pouring wine down each other’s naked throats. There wasn’t much fight left in the conscript regiments of their brigades by the time the sharp crew had their mortal fun with them.’

  Out on the lawn Nickleby had fallen flat on the grass in front of the sphinx-like steamman sentry; Coppertracks’ mu-bodies had no trouble loading his weeping form onto their shoulders and climbing the steps back to the house.

  ‘You should hide his pipe,’ said Molly.

  ‘He needs it, lass, to blot out the memories of Reudox.’

  ‘The city we bombed?’

  ‘The city we dirt-gassed, Molly. The sharp crew sent Silas out to Reudox with his real-box. After the attack the airship crew went down in masks and lined up all the shiftie bodies, a nice long line of corpses. Not soldiers or mill workers mind, but the ones who would make for a good daguerreotype picture back on the front line. Children in committee-school uniforms, mothers, babies, and old men clinging onto grandmothers, a good long line of mortal innocents. And then the sharp crew took real-box pictures of them for a series of accordion-folded news sheets, the house number and street name where each body had been found printed underneath. We dropped those pictures of the corpses on top of the people’s army and let them pass them to the soldiers who came from Reudox.’

  Molly felt sick. ‘We did that to the shifties?’

  ‘After the navy dropped the pictures on all the main shiftie cities, the Commonshare folded. Despite all their purges, all their secret police, all their informers, the Carlists would have been fed into a Gideon’s Collar if they had let any more of their cities be gassed. The shifties folded and clung to power and poor blessed Silas still tries to smoke away the faces of the dead babies at Reudox.’

  ‘Have you seen any of them?’ Molly asked. ‘The children I mean. As spectres at Tock House?’

  The commodore took a step back. ‘Unquiet spirits, lass? Do not speak of such things. Tock House is big enough for us, but not for all the poor ghosts of Reudox. Haven’t we suffered enough in this life without having to comfort the poor souls denied passage along the Circle?’

  ‘You haven’t seen a ghost in these corridors?’

  ‘There may be ghosts here, lass, but they keep to themselves – and let us leave it at that. Come, Molly, let’s help Aliquot Coppertracks put Silas back to bed and then we will cure our unsettled rest with a warm glass of mulled wine and a slice or two of ham.’

  Molly let the commodore lead her downstairs, but she felt a cold shiver as she stepped through the spot where the spectral girl had been standing. She had hoped Tock House was going to be a sanctuary from the people who wanted her dead, but with Silver Onestack’s vision following her around and her self-professed protector a half-insane leaafer, the protection of The Middlesteel Illustrated and its staff was starting to look distinctly flimsy.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Oliver stared with horror at his right hand, the wrist swelling up like a black balloon, hair and muscles rippling, more like the limb of a bear now than anything human.

  ‘I told you not to go near any of the ruins,’ shouted Harry.

  ‘I thought I heard someone calling,’ said Oliver. ‘Someone who needed help.’

  The disreputable Stave brandished the witch-knife that Mother had gifted to Oliver. ‘You’re the one who needs help now, lad. Your arm has got to come off below the elbow before it infects your entire body. Mage-war, Oliver, the earth-flow particles are active in your bloodstream – you’ll go into shock in three minutes unless I take it off.’

  Oliver held the arm out, bubbles of flesh climbing up the limb as he watched. ‘Do it now, before it gets to my shoulder.’

  ‘Let’s not,’ said the Whisperer, ‘and say we did anyway.’

  Harry started in disgust at the deformed feybreed. ‘Circle be jiggered, what the hell are you?’

  ‘Real,’ said the Whisperer, passing through the man. ‘Which is more than I can say for you.’

  Oliver was still yelling as his arm twisted and changed, but the dreamwalker reached out and held it, the limb returning to normal with his touch.

  ‘You’re losing your grip on your dreams,’ said the Whisperer. ‘Come on, Oliver, this is basic stuff.’

  ‘Whisperer. Nathaniel, thank you.’

  ‘Nathaniel is it now, Oliver? You’ve been charmed by our Lady of the Lights.’

  ‘You were there,’ said Oliver. ‘Before she appeared to me.’

  ‘She’s pure, Oliver. Or perhaps I should say raw – fundamental – even when she’s down here slumming with all the sentient bacteria on the skin of the world. Sharing a mind with her, well, I am like a moth trapped in the lantern room of a lighthouse.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Oliver. ‘She’s pure.’

  ‘Snap out of it, boy,’ spat the Whisperer. ‘She’s done a number on you, more than you know.’

  ‘What do you mean, Nathaniel?’

  ‘Nathaniel isn’t my name,’ hissed the Whisperer, rearing up. ‘Nathaniel was a frightened boy who was turned over to the worldsingers by his own father for the price of a couple of jinn bottles. I have better names now – there are tribes of craynarbians in Liongeli who worship me as Ka’mentar, the dream snake. Even the Whisperer is better than that stupid hamblin name.’

  ‘I don’t care what you want to call yourself, Whisperer,
it’s all the same to me. What do you mean she’s done a number on me?’

  The Whisperer scratched at his back with an oddly jointed limb. ‘Your memories, Oliver. Your early memories before you came to Hundred Locks to live with your uncle – they were always closed off to me. I thought it must have been some trauma keeping them buried, but it was her. Since her visit all the walls inside your mind have come down. I’ve been dipping into your mind, Oliver, and I’ve never seen anything like your memories before … even steammen minds make more sense than that mess, and believe me, I am a connoisseur.’

  Oliver felt the skin of his arm, he could feel the hairs, touch the veins; dreams with the Whisperer seemed so real, something about the creature’s presence made the imaginings immensely vivid. ‘I don’t think you can understand their world on this side of the feymist curtain, you have to be there – live with the fast-time people to understand.’

  ‘You know, Oliver, call me a natural pessimist if you will,’ said the Whisperer. ‘But I have a sneaking suspicion that when the Lady of the Lights was geeing you up to lead all the beautiful people into the sunset across the feymist veil, there was not much scope for the poor old troll to crawl out from under his bridge and join them.’

  ‘I’m sure she didn’t mean that,’ said Oliver.

  ‘Didn’t she?’ hissed the Whisperer. ‘She is part of the rule-set, Oliver. When some Spencer Street trader complains about weights and measures, wags a finger at Greenhall and complains you can’t buck the system, she’s the system they’re talking about. All that if the angel had a hammer I would be the nail nonsense. Right now, from where I’m standing, she’s rolling about a barrel of slipsharp oil, waving a match and shouting ‘fire, fire’. The Circle knows, Oliver, this turn of the wheel hasn’t exactly been kind to me – but jigger me, I still like it here. I’m not about to trade life in Jackals for that bad mumbleweed hallucination you call a childhood on the other side of the feymist curtain.’