The Court of the Air

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘We may not have a choice,’ said Oliver. ‘If our world is destroyed surely it’s better some of us live on somewhere else?’

  ‘We’re not meant to live there,’ insisted the Whisperer, raising a twisted arm with ears instead of fingers at the end of it. ‘Just a whiff of that filthy mist does this to more of us than not, those it doesn’t kill right off. Your children would not be human – you would not even qualify for membership after a decade more beyond the veil.’

  ‘Life is life,’ said Oliver. ‘I won’t let our people die out.’

  ‘Our people?’ hissed the Whisperer, laughing. ‘Oh, Oliver, oh, our great saviour. What are you, old man Panquetzaliztli, being visited by the gods and told to dig a warm hall under the mountains before the coldtime sweeps the land? You might be willing to roll over and help stock the Lady of the Lights’ menagerie of rare species, but I’m jiggered if I’ll lift one of my fate-cursed fingers to help her. Jackals is my country and this world is my home; if the landlord wants to move me on, she’d better send more than some abstraction with a poor attention span and some twinkle-twinkle lights – you understand? She’d better come mob-handed and be ready for a real fight.’

  ‘Nathaniel, Whisperer, you’re not thinking.’

  ‘I am thinking, Oliver,’ said the Whisperer. ‘I am just not trusting. You are waking up, boy. Best you reconsider who’s really on your side and what you are prepared to do to win.’

  ‘Whisperer,’ called Oliver. But he was being pulled down a tunnel, back to a cold camp on the Angelset moors.

  ‘What do you think, Oliver?’ said Harry. ‘Take the forest route or keep on over the bog?’

  Oliver looked at the oak trees then glanced at the soggy ground of the hills. The shadows between the trees seemed darker than they should, and something about the shape of the trees was wrong. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but they did not look like the pine woodland at the foot of Hundred Locks. ‘The forest would give us cover. But I don’t know, something about it makes my skin crawl.’

  ‘Good instincts, old stick. The cursewall runs through the trees – the canopy of leaves masks its noise. We could be blundering through the forest one minute and dead the next.’

  ‘How close are we to the Commonshare?’

  Harry pointed to the east. ‘Quatérshift is half a mile that way. The people’s paradise, where everything belongs to everybody and no wicked lords trample the common folk of the land. And if you believe that, I’ll tell you another.’

  ‘You’ve been there before?’

  ‘I preferred it before the revolution,’ said Harry. ‘Less pofaced. Last time I was there they used the words ‘Jackelian spy’ a lot and didn’t seem to appreciate it when I pointed out that they still had a ruling class, it just called itself the First Committee. There’s always an authority, Oliver, usually mustered by the ones with the sharpest blades and the fastest rate of fire. Trust me on that. From the perspective of someone who used to be a thief – there’s always someone waiting to feel your collar. In Jackals they give you the boat or the drop – in Quatérshift they shove you inside a Gideon’s Collar. You can slide a piece of paper between the difference to a poor old jack like me.’ Oliver shifted the weight of his backpack. ‘I thought you said you were an entrepreneur.’

  ‘Well, an entrepreneurial thief, perhaps. There I was at the heart of the Victualling Board, all the merchant lords making a fortune supplying the navy, all those cargoes and goods flowing across the land. I wouldn’t have been human if I hadn’t dipped my fingers in the honey pot a little – just to see what the taste was like, mind.’

  Oliver shook his head. ‘Must have tasted a lot like the rope at Bonegate.’

  ‘Not my fault, Oliver. Some clever transaction engine worm at the treasury noticed a discrepancy in the books. You know the funny thing, it wasn’t even me! The quality that ran the board only had half the staff they were claiming wages for – the rest were phantoms on the books, drawing salaries that just seemed to disappear into thin air. Greenhall sent in truth-sayers, and the quality needed some meat to throw to the dogs to keep their own necks from being stretched. So they put Harry chops on the menu.’

  ‘And my father helped you escape.’

  ‘Wasn’t so much an escape, Oliver, as a graduation. The wolftakers might as well rename Bonegate as their finishing school. Normally the Court of the Air just fakes a death in the cells – but there were too many navy jacks and Greenhall types waiting to see me dance the Bonegate jig for the crowds, so I went over the wall. Of course, I would have escaped on my own if push had come to shove. My neck’s a little too precious to me to see it stretched for the sins of the penny dippers that sit on the Victualling Board.’

  ‘But you were defrauding them,’ said Oliver.

  ‘Spoken like the true nephew of a merchant,’ said Harry. ‘It’s the principle of the thing – you don’t let another jack hang for a crime which you committed yourself. The lowest angler in the rookeries, the slipperiest highwayman on the Innverney Road would tell you the same – but that’s one fashion that hasn’t caught up with the quality yet.’

  Oliver pushed on across the wet ground. ‘I’m glad they didn’t make you catch the drop, Harry.’

  ‘Me too,’ said the disreputable Stave, fingering his neck with a shiver. ‘Now take the Commonshare over there. What a racket; I wish I’d thought of that one. I’d have got the rope for a few missing bales of aerostat canvas – but you travel a mile over the border and they stole the whole country and convinced everyone in the place to become an accomplice. Masterful. Bleeding masterful.’

  They walked on, skirting the forest and then crossing the wet low hills that opened up before them. Oliver was wondering when they would pitch up for lunch when he stubbed his boot against an iron pipe, nearly tumbling over across the boggy ground. Angry with himself for not spotting the metal he gave it a kick. ‘Looks like someone’s chimney.’

  ‘Not a chimney,’ said Harry, pointing along the grass. ‘That’s a steamman stack.’

  Oliver followed the sweep of the wolftaker’s hand. Fragments of metal jutted out across the slopes – broken fingers clutching for the heavens, the horns of helmet-like heads, ancient iron bodies smashed open – home now only to frogs and nesting moorhens.

  The place looked cold, hard and bleak. ‘A graveyard?’

  ‘Of sorts, Oliver. This was a battlefield. We’ve reached the Drammon Broads – further east is the mouth of the Steammen Free State. The cursewall swings around their territory too; the Commonshare doesn’t trust Jackals’ oldest ally.’

  ‘Circle’s turn, Harry, how many dead are there here?’

  ‘Enough, Oliver. Marshal Adecole marched the Sixth Brigade of the People’s Army through the mountains at the start of the Two-Year War. King Steam’s knights broke the back of them down here. Most of the trenches have filled in now, but if you dug deep enough, you’d find the bones and rotting shakos of Quatérshift’s elite troops – the pieces the foxes haven’t dragged away.’

  Perhaps the old battlefield had unsettled the disreputable Stave too, because he kept up his commentary like one of the tourist entertainers who haunted the foot of the waterways at Hundred Locks, filling the eerie silence with the life of his voice. The rotting spokes of light artillery wheels, the shattered glass of old cannon charges, rusting harpoons from Commonshare anti-steammen ordinance, lead balls from Free State pressure repeaters – each picked out as landmarks on the gruesome wartime tour.

  After the ranks of buried, mud-drowned corpses fell away, Oliver spotted a splash of red on the side of the hill – out of place, as if someone had spread a gaudy picnic blanket over the gloomy brown slopes. ‘That looks fresh.’

  ‘A bizarre enough sight out here, old stick,’ agreed Harry. ‘Let’s take a closer peek.’

  As they got nearer Oliver saw that the object was not as uniform as it first appeared. What he had taken for a solid crimson swathe was a patchwork of oblongs stitched together, mostly re
d, but some with stripes and yellow suns sewn on. They were flags, pieced together by wiry cord – river fisherman’s netting by the look of it; the large wave of canvas lying crumpled over a mound.

  ‘What is it, Harry?’

  The wolftaker looked towards the east, his lips pursed. ‘Let’s go, lad.’

  ‘What is it? It looks like flags.’

  ‘You don’t need to know – let’s just keep going south.’

  Oliver took the corner of the canvas and tipped it up. There was a blanket underneath, a huddle of sacks with … a field of fungus-like balloons growing out of them. This was a strange way to farm mushrooms. But then Oliver saw the lines of legs, arms, hands, a couple clutching tightly at each other. Dear Circle, that was a baby they were holding between them, its feet as tiny as a doll’s – so small and grey he could not even see if it was a boy or a girl. Bile rose in Oliver’s throat and before he knew what he was doing his breakfast was vomiting over the grass as he stumbled towards the family to see if any of them were alive.

  Harry seized his arm. ‘Don’t touch them. You can’t help them now.’

  ‘They might be alive, they might be.’

  ‘Oliver, no. They’ve been through the cursewall. Those things growing on them are from the hex – sometimes their hearts give out, sometimes they start sprouting plague spores, sometimes they might age a hundred years or have their blood turn to stone. They were dead the moment their balloon lost height and they blew through the wall.’

  ‘They can’t have had a balloon.’ Oliver was crying. ‘They don’t have balloons in Quatérshift.’

  ‘They don’t have celgas, Oliver. They don’t have aerostats. But take canvas, fire, hot air … you have a balloon. Not good enough to get them over the cursewall, but how were they to know? I doubt if there’s many engineers left on their side of the wall now.’

  Oliver couldn’t take his eyes off the human wreckage – bodies that once laughed, cried, walked, lived, now just bags of flesh, no spark of what had made them human. How could it be? One moment something vital with hopes and dreams, the next nothing – compost for a hex-born toadstool.

  Oliver sunk to his knees. ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘I wish you hadn’t had to find out,’ said the wolftaker.

  ‘But you knew, Harry.’

  ‘Most of the refugees come by water, Oliver. Can’t run a cursewall under the water – over it, but not under it. And yes, I’ve seen this before. During the worst of the famine years the refugees even tried building a catapult to throw themselves over the wall. It would almost have been funny, if you hadn’t seen how thin the bodies were that rained down on Jackals.’

  Oliver’s throat had dried up. ‘Why?’

  ‘Why?’ said Harry. ‘For the big idea, Oliver. Someone comes up with the big idea – could be religion, could be politics, could be the race you belong to, or your clan, or philosophy, or economics, or your sex or just how many bleeding guineas you got stashed in the counting house. Doesn’t matter, because the big idea is always the same – wouldn’t it be good if only everyone was the same as me – if only everyone else thought and acted and worshipped and looked like me, everything would become a paradise on earth.

  ‘But people are too different, too diverse to fit into one way of acting or thinking or looking. And that’s where the trouble starts. That’s when they show up at your door to make the ones who don’t fit vanish, when, frustrated by the lack of progress and your stupidity and plain wrongness at not appreciating the perfection of the big idea, they start trying to shave off the imperfections. Using knives and racks and axe-men and camps and Gideon’s Collars. When you see a difference in a person and can find only wickedness in it – you and them – the them become fair game, not people anymore but obstacles to the greater good, and it’s always open season on the them.’

  Harry pointed at the bodies huddled in the wreckage. ‘That’s the true power of evil. You think the people that made those poor jacks’ lives so unbearable the only choice that was left to them was to trust their fate to the wind and a bag of cloth; you think they think of themselves as wicked? In their own minds the rulers of the Commonshare are princes on white horses, Oliver, dispensing justice and largesse and making the world a better place. Even as they’re tossing burning torches onto the thatched roofs of them, even as their boots stamp on the fingers of the children of them, in their daydreams the First Committee are heroes, beating down the obstacles to perfection one corpse at a time. Funny thing is, the litany of cant the victors chant over the bodies of the innocent might sound different for each big idea, but you know what, it always sounds like the same jiggering words to me.’

  Harry threw the canvas back over the bodies in disgust, covering their empty shells. ‘They used flags to make it. That’s fitting. More flags in the Commonshare now than blankets.’

  ‘I can still see them,’ said Oliver.

  ‘Yes you can. And you will for years. And next time you meet some holy jacks banging on about how the Circle will save you, ask them what their views on the next election are. And when you meet Carlists banging on about how the party will make you free, you ask them what their faith in spirit is. Because the big idea suffers no rival obsessions to confuse its hosts, no dissent, no deviation or heresy from its perfection. You want to know what these poor sods really died for, Oliver? They died for a closed mind too small to hold more than a single truth.’

  The wolftaker took out the jug of slipsharp oil and sprinkled black pools of the thick liquid over the crumpled skin of the makeshift balloon. ‘Time to burn the flags, I think.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Oliver. To the family, to the moor-bitten wind, to no one in particular.

  Harry stuck a match and threw it onto the canvas, flames leaping up and crackling across the fabric. ‘One day you’ll face a trial, Oliver. A difficult task that may seem impossible. A choice you can’t confront. When that time comes, you remember these three here on this day. Remember all the details you’re going to try so hard to forget. Then you’ll know what you need to do.’

  ‘Is that what you do, Harry?’

  ‘Your father told me that, Oliver,’ said the wolftaker. ‘And he was right too. I’ve seen so many bodies for so many big ideas. Sometimes it’s the only way you can make yourself go on.’

  The fire reached across the length of the quilt. At the head of the hill the remaining mist of the day was spreading out towards the sky as smoke billowed and curled around the wreckage of the flimsy vessel. Oliver looked on in amazement. The mist was coalescing into a body. Were the ghosts of the poor dead family returning to visit their own pyre?

  ‘Harry!’

  ‘I see it,’ said the wolftaker.

  Slowly the mist took shape – a horned warrior in armour – no, not armour – the plate metal was its body … a steamman.

  ‘Harry, what in the Circle’s name?’

  ‘Steamo Loa,’ said Harry. ‘One of their gods – an ancestral spirit.’

  As they watched, the spectral figure pointed a mailed glove towards the south, its head slowly shaking in warning, then it turned to the east and pointed a hand in the direction of the distant mountains – the Steammen Free State. The meaning was clear.

  ‘It doesn’t want us to go to Shadowclock, Harry.’

  ‘Jigger me sideways, now I really have seen everything. Unless there’s a worldsinger behind that hill laughing himself silly; but why?’

  In answer to the disreputable Stave’s question a strange howl rent the air, like a human in pain screaming through the throat of a wolf.

  ‘What was that sound, Harry?’

  Harry looked at the mist above the hill – the shape of the steamman now shredding into ribbons in the sky. ‘Nothing that should be this far north of the Cassarabian border. Run for the mountains, boy. Fast – NOW.’

  Sprinting back through the graveyard of the battlefield, Oliver glanced behind them. Nothing. Just the wreckage of the Quatérshiftian refugees’ escape attempt.


  ‘Your blunderbuss,’ Harry called across to Oliver. ‘The gun, unstrap it and load up.’

  Harry was pulling his long pistol out of his pack as he ran, breaking it and slipping in a charge. Oliver’s bell-muzzled gun was jouncing along the side of his folded tent – strapped just the way the wolftaker had shown him. One pull of the fastening and the weapon was falling, its wooden handle in his right hand. Thumbing the release as he ran, he broke the gun in the middle so that the barrel was swinging towards the ground on its hinge. The crystal charge felt like ice in his hand, fingers fumbling to push it into the breach. It dropped in perfectly and the blunderbuss clacked shut with a gentle push from the heel of his palm.

  Oliver scanned the landscape behind them. ‘I can’t hear the noise anymore.’

  ‘Close,’ puffed Harry. ‘Hunting silent.’

  Something hammered Oliver into the boggy mud, arcing past and barrelling into the wolftaker; rolling Harry to the ground, a mass of exposed pulsing muscles – as if the creature had allowed its skin and fur to be flayed from its body. Oliver got back to his feet. The creature’s paws were smashing the ground and Harry was a blur, using his worldsinger tricks again, dodging the thing’s claws even as it had him trapped.

  Like the crack of snapping wood something pinged off the rocks to Oliver’s right, showering his shoulder with flinty dust. Redcoats stood on the hills where Oliver and Harry had been heading before the spectre’s warning, holding long spindly rifles with bayonets fixed on their barrels, barrels that were pointing towards him.

  Harry was rolling in the mud with the hunting monster. Even if he had been a marksman, not an amateur with a sailor’s boarding gun, Oliver couldn’t let a shot off without hitting them both. There was a growl and Oliver looked up at the granite outcrop he had backed into just as the second beast leapt down on him. Oliver screamed as the hunter clawed into his left arm, the weight whamming him down to the watery soil, desperately shoving the blunderbuss into the monster’s mouth. It was ripping the naval pattern out of his hand as he triggered the weapon, an explosion of buckshot and thunder ricocheting off the rock – most of it peppering the creature’s flank, one of the lead pellets glancing across Oliver’s cheek and tearing it open.