by Stephen Hunt
It was morning outside. As they lowered the ramp the bright light made Oliver wince after the darkness of the hold. Down. Walk casually – with purpose. Not three scuttling intruders fleeing the shadow of the airship. Crewmen. Then Oliver heard the shout and risked a glance back. There, by the line of resigned workers being ushered into the gates of the old mine. It was the Whisperer! A shambling child-sized feybreed, so distorted by the mist it was hard to see where his limbs began and his torso ended. But it was not the Whisperer’s bitter soul inside the fey creature; and this thing wore plated armour – a worldsinger containment suit – metal shells covered in runes and strung tightly together with wire. It was pointing at them and howling like it was caught in the embrace of a torture rack. Pointing straight at Oliver.
From the cover of the trees they were heading for a patrol of redcoats stepped out into the clearing.
‘Now we fight,’ said Steamswipe.
Oliver’s hands burned searing. He looked down and reali zed that the reverend’s gifts had appeared there. Harry stared at the two guns open-mouthed like a man whose life had ended. A shot splintered past them. Steamswipe turned and Lord Wireburn shot out a ball of revolving fire – a miniature sun that slapped into the guards behind them. Seven soldiers were incinerated, a splash of jelly-like fire landing on the nearest guards. Steamswipe fired again. After each shot Lord Wireburn let out a shriek, half an inhalation, half a gagging exhalation, as if the holy weapon was sucking in the life of the deceased.
Both of Oliver’s pistols discharged, two attackers were hammered off their feet, then he flicked the guns open, reloading from his bandoleer with a smooth mechanical precision. The disreputable Stave was moving in witch-time, his long-barrelled pistol in his hand. Oliver could follow him now; see the distortion of the bones of the earth as Harry drank in its energy, leylines snaking around his feet, twisting and pulsing. Stave’s pistol crackled, the charge smoke momentarily shrouding the perplexed look on his face. Oliver could see from a dozen perspectives simultaneously: aeronauts from the stat climbing back up the ramp, miners fleeing for cover, redcoats in front, the Grimhope outlaws by the mine entrance.
Oliver laughed like a demon, knowing that the sound of it would unnerve them all. The attacking patrol had discharged their rifles and rather than reloading they were closing at a rush with wicked bayonets fixed, screaming in rage and fear. Steamswipe let his own voice be heard, the echo from his voicebox collapsing a redcoat even as the steamman galloped into their company. A machine of death, he swung his hammer arm in fast meticulous arcs, crumpling soft bodies, staving in skulls, trampling down the soldiers under his hooves. They were almost on Oliver now. He raised his left hand and put a lead ball through the face of one of the soldiers, side-stepping a bayonet thrust. He shattered the bayonet owner’s knee with a kick – pistol-whipping the back of the soldier’s head as the man’s bayonet caught in the mud.
Harry was by his side, then gone and just as suddenly back, tripping up the attackers in a blur of boots. Oliver sensed the rifleman taking aim at them from the top of the mine works; saw the barrel sighting on his own spine. Tipping his right arm over his shoulder his uncharged pistol bucked once, the marksman’s corpse tumbling off the roof. He had not even looked.
Harry had stopped moving and was looking up at the sky. ‘Not bloody now!’
Explosions flowered around them, dirt showering into the air. A wave of searing heat punched Oliver to the ground and earth plummeted down on him by the spadeful, as if manic diggers tossing clods of mud had surrounded him and were feverishly digging him a grave. He was deaf now – petals of flame erupted all around him in silent fury. Both pistols were still in his hands, solid and reassuring. Half interred beneath the earth Oliver watched as ropes coiled down through the smoke, ladders for vengeful angels in black leather capes and visored hoods with rubber tubes hanging at either side.
Oliver could not see out of their eyes, could not feel their souls – could barely sense their presence at all. Harry’s words came back to him. ‘We’ve got a military arm called the incrementals for the hard slap work. Proper killers. If they had come after us neither of us would be alive to be discussing it now.’
One of them swept him with a mirrored gaze, hardly registering his existence. Not a threat. Then an identical warrior emerged from the smoke, a body slung limply over its shoulder, the victim’s trousers and waistcoat torn to shreds by the explosions. The disreputable Stave! The Court of the Air was reclaiming their rogue wolftaker. Both incrementals were heading for a rope ladder emerging from the dark scud of their barrage – a ladder that for all intents and purposes might be reaching to the ceiling of the sky.
Moaning with the pain of the effort, Oliver pulled out the knife from his boot and tried to rise; but a spiked boot kicked it from his hand before he could activate the witch-blade – a third incremental tracking backwards towards the rope. The warrior’s hand reached out and a finger wagged slowly backwards and forwards.
In his other hand the incremental held a rifle with a barrel as long as a lance, covering Oliver with its muzzle. They were leaving him behind. But then what did they care about a young registered man ripped from his home and tossed into their savage world? Just one more body for the crushers’ justice and the doomsman’s gallows. Oliver laughed. If he lived through the coming cataclysm, they would care enough. He would make them. The warrior stopped, briefly surprised by the eerie sound of mirth. Then he was at the rope ladder and hauling himself up after the other two incrementals. The ladder began to lift out of sight.
Oliver cursed and retrieved his knife. Bursting through the smoke, Steamswipe came galloping into view, scanned Oliver and glanced up to the occluded sky. He pointed Lord Wireburn up at a firmament hidden by the dark murk of battle. ‘It is an aerosphere,’ said the holy weapon. ‘I have its signature sighted. Forty feet above us.’
‘Can you bring it down?’ Oliver coughed, getting to his feet.
‘I am an annihilator, little softbody, not a birding rifle from a Jackelian gunsmith,’ said Lord Wireburn. ‘I can destroy it, or I can let it go. It is at seventy feet now.’
‘Let it go. Bloody Circle!’
Harry was gone. They would break his mind and then whatever was left of his body would be tossed into a holding cell, to rot next door to all of the other undesirables who had crossed the Court. His friend, his guide had vanished – all that was left was the terrible hunger and evil that had found Oliver in Hundred Locks and stalked him across the face of Jackals. His hope had gone, but there was the wickedness. He could still feel that.
‘Reinforcements are coming out of the mine,’ said Oliver.
Steamswipe scooped him up with his blood-slicked hammer and his manipulator arm, dropping him onto his back. Across the sundered ground a line of figures broke through the smoke and the burning gorse, black leather cloaks rising in the heat of the fire. The Special Guard and a handful of the Whisperer-like feybreed. As soon as they caught sight of Oliver, the Whisperer-things struck out at his mind, pulses of hateful energy darting at his mentality. At the same time a Special Guardsman raised his arm, pouring cerulean flames at Oliver and his steamman steed. Blue flame licked off an invisible dome surrounding them while Oliver caught the biting darts of the mind assault and twisted them back towards their owners, the Whisperer-things tumbling screaming onto the ground.
‘A worldsinger,’ cried one of the guardsmen.
‘No,’ said Captain Flare, emerging from the line. ‘He is one of us. Can’t you feel his power? He is a brother of the mist.’
Steamswipe surged forward, Lord Wireburn spitting fluidic sun-spheres at the line. Oliver barely held onto the stampeding knight. ‘Let me make you brothers to the worms, you damn murdering softbodies. Steelbhalah-Waldo! Steelbhalah-Waldo!’
Oliver scarcely kept up with the scattering line – some speeded up into witch-time blurs, others turned invisible or swelled up into iron-solid mountains of flesh. Several of Lord Wirebur
n’s sun spheres disappeared into swirling rips in the air, others splattered against a wall of circular orange shields which had been conjured in front of the Special Guardsmen. Steamswipe rode down a guardswoman, his hammer upper-cutting another in the chest, lifting the guard high into the air. The steamman had gone into a berserker frenzy; Oliver could feel the purity of his rage, the righteousness of his fury. Attacks lashed out from all four sides but Oliver turned them back, diverted them, slapped each of them down. Fire, ice, darts of porcupine spine, the claw-like attempts to batter inside his mind. Faster and faster they struck.
Oliver caught the presence of the two Grimhope outlaws behind them, crossbows loaded with a weight of bolas. A pistol bucked in Oliver’s hand and the ball caught an outlaw in his gut. His compatriot fired and the rotating bolas caught Steamswipe’s hind legs, snarling the knight. As the steamman tripped Oliver flew off with all the momentum of the stalled dash. More Grimhopers rushed him from the rear, fey energies licking out from the front. Too close to reload
Oliver pulled out his knife and activated it with a twist, the hilt squirming in his hand as it reacted to its owner’s presence. This blade had not been forged by the race of man. It was alive; it recognized the bloodline of Phileas Brooks.
‘Sword,’ said Oliver and the blade flowed upwards, a hilt curving out from the handle.
He moved through the charge of Grimhope outlaws and they kept running even as their chests separated from their legs in a rain of severed limbs while Oliver swept the witch-blade around in a fencer’s dance – the echo of earlier selves following him like a shadow, the ghost of his father among them. A howl of steam sounded behind him and Oliver dropped to one knee, skewering a brute with a trident. Captain Flare was riding Steamswipe’s back, one fist pummelling the knight’s boiler, the other pinning Lord Wireburn. His friend’s stacks were mewling as the source of his steamman strength leaked away. Steamswipe’s manipulator arms were twisted back; trying to unseat the Captain of the Special Guard and bring him within range of his hammer arm.
Oliver stepped forward to help Steamswipe but a figure shivered into life in front of him – an old woman in a guardsman’s cloak – either she had been invisible or she could throw her body across distances. She struck out and Oliver barely avoided her kick. Disconcerting. Like having to fight old Damson Griggs. His witch-blade flicked out to pierce her torc-bound throat, following its own enchanted curve of raw ruthlessness, but it seethed against a transparent shield of fire that sparked as the blade glanced off it. Oliver danced back, avoiding the discus of energy she was manifesting. He tried to neutralise the shield, but her fey power snaked out beneath his perception.
‘Raw power isn’t enough, boy,’ she said, circling him. ‘You need discipline, focus.’
His ears were still ringing from the explosions; her voice sounded like it was being carried through water. ‘Let’s see if it isn’t.’ His witch-blade ached in his grip, eager to sink itself through her chest. His pistols sung to be reloaded, a dozen past lives making him dizzy, detailing the hundred ways he could dispatch the old woman.
She sliced a clawed hand at Oliver and he stepped into her grasp, feeling the crackle of her skin, the energy of her fey-twisted soul – amplifying it, feeding it – making the fields glowing around her hands ignite as bright as one of Lord Wireburn’s sunbursts. Screaming, she fell back, her two hands ablaze. There was little evil in her soul, only determination and loyalty to her compatriots – an age served in the guard. He ignored the witch-blade’s call to carve her head off its neck and turned towards Steamswipe.
Captain Flare had battered the knight into semi-consciousness. Steamswipe’s boiler was twisted and deformed and venting steam from a dozen tears, the light of his vision plate a faint red smear behind his visor. Wrathful, Oliver bounded forward, his witch-blade looping out, boiling to sever one of those perfectly muscled arms from the captain’s trunk. But the witch-knife flexed off the Special Guardsman’s arm, its blade quivering in agony. After centuries of use it had finally sliced into something dense enough to resist its passage.
Flare closed on him. ‘How did the fey-finders miss you, boy? You should have joined the guard years ago.’
Oliver rolled past his grip and thrust the tip of the witch-blade into his knee, the blade distorting and retracting back into its knife-size in protest. ‘I prefer my freedom.’
Flare slapped the blade out of his hand, turning to land a punch on Oliver’s face. ‘Then we have something in common, mist-brother.’
Oliver reached out and dampened the fey energies in the pile-driving jab. But even as a mortal the captain’s flesh had been built up by years in the muscle-pits – it was not just for impressing Jackals’ citizenry when he escorted the monarch. Oliver fell back reeling. Another Special Guardsman was behind him and Oliver drained the blue fire that erupted towards his back, sinking it into a fold in the air. Then another guardsman appeared through the carnage wrought by the aerosphere, then a third and a fourth. Gravity turned upside down and Oliver cancelled it; the air turned cold enough to freeze solid but he heated it; he deflected a lance of light back into the feybreed mob as he turned away a blow to his spine from Flare. Oliver fired a charge into the empty space where the translucent guardsman was trying to sneak up on him, the broken glass of the shell crunching as he ejected it.
More Whisperer-things broke against his mind, compressing his skull with pain. Oliver severed their mental link, killing them instantly, but in the second it took to twist away their attack Captain Flare landed a kick against his side, not dampened. It was as if someone had collapsed a house around him. He tried to rise but a dozen guardsmen were on top of him, striking with their fists and their boots and their mist-gifted powers.
They hauled him to his feet, beaten and bloody. Steamswipe was behind them, wheezing and broken on the chewed-up ground. Oliver’s bruised eyes rolled across the sky. No sign of the aerosphere. Harry had gone, forced to face the Court’s justice at last. It was over. Oliver had failed Jackals and the Lady of the Lights, failed to punish his family’s killers, failed to honour his father’s legacy or even to protect his friends’ lives.
‘What’s it to be, brother?’ said Flare.
‘I see you,’ Oliver roared. ‘I see you all. The evil that taints your souls.’ He concentrated on the fallen steamman. Lord Wireburn flew from the side of the prone knight and out towards Oliver’s hand, only to slap into the grip of a Special Guardsman who shimmered into existence between them. The guardsman reversed the holy weapon and shoved its ebony butt into his face. Then Oliver’s thrashing really began.
Chapter Twenty
Someone was standing in front of the light at the end of the tunnel. Molly stepped forward apprehensively. She had no idea how she had got here – although she knew there were things that had happened to her that she should have been able to remember.
The silhouette of the figure beckoned her; as she got nearer it became more detailed. It was a girl. Someone who should be familiar, someone Molly knew, a figure in the corridor of a house at night. Tock House, the name leapt at her. Something had happened at Tock House, the thing she should be able to remember. Confused, she peered closer at the girl – less ghost-like, more solid, but still as silent as a mime.
Molly tried to speak with her voice, but nothing came out. That was not the way to communicate with this apparition of … a steamman, Silver Onestack. That name brought more flashes of memory images. But the girl was her spectre now, not the steamman’s. She fair glowed, giving off warmth that comforted the pain in Molly’s heart.
The spectre just smiled and pointed at the light.
The girl nodded.
The light grew, enveloping her, freezing her with its clarity. Then it grew dim and she was on a mud floor in a cave-like cell. The hardness of the floor, the stiffness in her bones and the tingling she felt on her skin
– this was real.
‘Molly,’ said Nickleby.
She rolled over. The pensman and Commodore Black were in the cell with her.
‘I—’ she could not finish her words, choking and coughing.
‘Ah, lass,’ said the commodore. ‘That’s it, cough it out. We were dirt-gassed and you the lightest in weight of us all. It was cut mortal thin though, or we would have left our lungs back at Tock House.’
Molly looked around the cell. No beds, a night pan – more for the guards’ comfort than theirs, she suspected. Metal bars joined the ceiling to the floor; the back of the room was a slope of rock.
‘Where is Aliquot?’
‘He wasn’t with us when we woke up,’ said Nickleby. ‘I think he must have slipped past them in the fighting.’
‘Aye, either that or gone down with Tock House,’ said the commodore. ‘Dirt-gas could scrub his crystals. That’s the way you take a boat too, when she’s on the surface and you want to board her easy. Cut her hull and pump her full of gas, have the sailors running around like rabbits in a warren; then you send down the stoats.’
‘He can seal off the air flues to his boiler system, run cold. Coppertracks could last hours without needing air.’
‘Perhaps,’ said the commodore. ‘But it still leaves us here, hanging like hares in the larder. Waiting for our precious necks to be sliced.’
Molly pressed her face to the bars. She thought she had heard the footsteps of someone coming.
‘But who is to be doing the slicing?’ asked Nickleby.
A voice came down the corridor. ‘A good question, to be sure.’
It was Count Vauxtion, a party of black-clad toppers at his heels and a woman, her grey hair tied into buns. Count Vauxtion looked at the woman. ‘You can confirm her blood machine record?’
‘I can,’ she replied. ‘She is the genuine article. I am already preparing arrangements to pay your finder’s fee.’
