The Court of the Air

by Stephen Hunt

  Captain Flare looked at the guardsman who had come back from the quartermaster’s office, passing the requisitions list across – half the items crossed out – for Bonefire to read. ‘How can there be only half the grain we requested?’

  ‘Commander, have you seen what it’s like in the city?’ replied the guardsman. ‘Nobody is going to work any more in case they get seized by the brilliant men and passed over for equalization – Circle, nobody is sure if it’s even legal to work. The canals are frozen, the crops are under snow and the Third Brigade has been looting anything in Middlesteel that isn’t nailed down. We’re lucky we got what we did.’

  ‘We need supplies for the journey south,’ said Bonefire, ‘and more besides while we build our new city.’

  ‘Quartermaster’s people said we should wait. Greenhall are assigning navvies to break the ice on the waterways – when the Second and Seventh Brigades cross over the border the shifties will be able to help with the work. The Commonshare are working to lower the cursewall; they thought it would be straightforward to take it down, but when they tried to drop it they found the worldsingers who raised the wall have been purged, so now they’re trying to solve their own hexes from the spell books.’

  ‘That could take months,’ said Flare. ‘Where is the aerostat they promised us?’

  ‘Problems there too,’ replied the guardsman. ‘There’s a vessel we can use but we’re trying to scare up a merchant crew to fly her.’

  ‘Merchant? What about the navy, the jack cloudies?’

  ‘Seems the mutiny at Shadowclock didn’t go as well as was hoped, commander. The fleet had been half-purged, but someone slipped word to the navigators and pilots. When the citadel fell the deck officers had vanished – Tzlayloc’s people have been running aeronauts through the Gideon’s Collar trying to get the survivors to collaborate.’

  Flare shook his head in frustration. ‘No doubt inspiring the same loyalty we felt towards the order. These idiots couldn’t organize a harvest-merrie, let alone a revolution. This is no way to overthrow a tyranny! Where is the Third Brigade liaison?’

  Bonefire indicated the scene below the chamber’s window. ‘Someone at the Brigade must have heard you.’

  Down below, Marshal Arinze’s retinue followed the leader of the Third Brigade as he swept imperiously past the shadow of the Gideon’s Collar set up in the palace square. Captain Flare got to his feet as the Marshal came through the door, his pet wolftaker in tow wearing a plain blue Quatérshiftian brigade tunic.

  ‘Marshal, I had no idea you were personally involved with the quartermaster’s office.’

  Arinze took the supply orders, looked at them, then passed them contemptuously back to a staff officer. ‘Hardly, compatriot captain. Your store requisitions have been put on hold.’

  ‘On hold?’ said Bonefire, his tone less than respectful.

  Arinze ignored the mere guardsman and addressed his comments to the captain. ‘Things are not moving as fast as they should be, compatriot captain. Middlesteel is ours but elsewhere in Jackals the forces of tyranny are organizing against us. We have not yet managed to float the RAN and our scouts report that some of the survivors from Fulven Fields are organizing Jackals’ regiments along the southern frontier.’

  ‘That is not our concern,’ said Flare. ‘Lower the cursewall; bring more troops across on the atmospheric; chase off the gunboats in the Sepia Sea and land soldiers in the north. It is not my job to teach your forces how to campaign.’

  ‘The First Committee of Jackals believes it is your concern,’ said Marshal Arinze. ‘If you want to claim your territory you will have to earn it.’

  Flare pointed an irate finger at Arinze. ‘Claim! We are not applicants at the board of the poor, Marshal. The Fey Free State is ours. We have a deal with Tzlayloc; we have worked with him, not for him. The Special Guard is not yet an arm of the brilliant men and the Middlesteelians you have been slaughtering may be hamblins, but they are still citizens of Jackals.’

  Arinze snapped his fingers and was handed a sheaf of rolled papers. ‘All revolutions come with a butcher’s bill attached, compatriot captain. It’s time you got your hands dirty. Here are your orders from the First Committee.’

  Flare tore off the wax seal and scanned the papers. ‘March on the uplands under the command of the second company of the Third Brigade. Is this a joke? We had a deal, Arinze. We would mutiny when they ordered us into action against you, but we told you we would not fight against our own regiments. We ensured the RAN would be docked in harbour when you attacked. We made sure every Guardian, every commercial lord and person of quality in Jackals would be in Middlesteel for the coronation when you arrived. Without the Special Guard the remnants of your army would be limping its way back to Quatérshift pulling shards of fin-bomb crystal out of their uniforms.’

  ‘No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy, compat riot captain. Times have changed. The deal has changed.’

  ‘Jigger you!’ shouted Bonefire. ‘You dirty hamblin, you want a change of deal? Let’s see how you enjoy my terms…’

  Fire lashed out from the guardsman’s fist, bathing the Marshal in wraithlike light. Arinze dropped to the floor of the palace screaming in distress. Flare pushed the arm of the Special Guardsman towards the ceiling, dragging Bonefire away kicking from the Quatérshiftian officer.

  ‘Let’s see if Tzlayloc and his committee men want to renegotiate when I rip your skull off and toss it to them in a sack, you shiftie scum,’ shouted Bonefire.

  Arinze got to his feet. ‘Striking an officer of the Third Brigade is a capital offence, compatriot guardsman.’

  ‘I’m not in your army, shiftie. I barely even belong to the race of man anymore.’

  ‘Execute him!’ shouted Arinze.

  Behind the marshal two worldsingers stepped out of his retinue and circled Bonefire chanting. The Special Guardsman started to laugh, but his expression turned to shock as his body started folding in on itself, caught in an invisible press. Around his neck the hexes on the silver torc glowed, the fire of their brilliance sucking in air and whistling around his body like a kettle coming to the boil. The Special Guardsman’s arms and legs made popping noises, crushed under their own weight, red slashes hurtling across his skin as veins exploded. Bonefire twisted like a corkscrew, held erect in a hidden field before them as his muscles were crushed beyond use. The two worldsingers stopped their chanting and the bloody mess that was left flopped to the palace flagstones with a sickening slap.

  Flare’s hand had unconsciously moved to the torc around his neck. ‘You—’

  ‘It took a long time for our worldsingers to unlock the hexes on your little necklaces,’ said Marshal Arinze. ‘I am told it took a dedicated team three years to solve them. Another two years to leave them in place but neutralize the trigger. Do you really think we went to all that trouble to leave a military force as powerful as the Special Guard in the field unchecked? We did not neutralize the hexes, compatriot captain, we modified them.’

  Flare stumbled back. ‘What have I done, what have I done?’

  ‘Do not worry, compatriot captain, you shall have your territory in the south. After you have fought for it – after you have earned it. You will like serving as part of the Third Brigade. We are not prudes like Compatriot Tzlayloc and his First Committee with their funny little ways. Nobody in the Commonshare of Quatérshift will be lining up to have their bodies changed in your flesh mills. We are proud of our bodies – they must be kept strong to serve the revolution.’ Arinze ran his hands down Major Wildrake’s chest. ‘Your guardsmen have been blessed with power and that power will serve us very well. You shall breed your city of fey-born, and your children will become the shock troops of the revolution.’

  ‘We are free,’ said Flare, as if repeating it would make it true.

  ‘There is no greater freedom than service to the community,’ said Arinze. ‘And service as the guardians of the cause has its rewards. Circlist prigs do not command us; we d
o not hang our soldiers for taking women, we do not hang them for stealing poultry from the henhouse of an enemy peasant. For hard men to be asked to do hard things in the name of the people, to inflict terror on the enemy, they must be kept as sharp as the sabres they carry.’

  ‘It must be difficult for you, Flare,’ said Major Wildrake. ‘I am a Jackelian too, I understand. But these people recognize the nature of our race. They opened my eyes to the principles of community, showed me how soft and weak I had become – how decadent Jackals had become.’

  ‘Sometimes it takes one not born in the Commonshare to see its true beauty,’ said Marshal Arinze. ‘Now, where is the King who missed his crown – where is the pup?’

  ‘Alpheus?’ said Flare. ‘What do you want with him?’

  ‘For my part, nothing. Tzlayloc wants him.’

  Flare’s voice sounded on edge. ‘Prince Alpheus helped the revolution, he helped ensure everyone was in Middlesteel when you needed them there.’

  ‘And now Compatriot Alpheus is to serve the revolution again.’

  ‘How is he to serve it?’ Captain Flare demanded.

  Arinze motioned a party of worldsingers and soldiers to search the palace. ‘A question better put to Chairman Tzlayloc. Like I said, your countrymen do have their funny little ways.’

  ‘Deals change,’ mumbled Flare. His guardsmen eyed the worldsingers among the shiftie troops with unconcealed loathing. That strange fey boy they had captured had been eerily prophetic – in the end they had only swapped one set of masters for another.

  Molly had never run so far or so fast before – even Slowstack’s inexhaustible body had trouble keeping pace with her. There was a strange hum in her legs; a pain that only the exertion of running seemed to cancel. The very stuff of her blood fizzed with her increasing proximity to the Hexmachina, and the closer she got the more her body was changed. She could feel the pain of the earth now, the tunnels and cities of Chimeca like scar tissue over an old wound; the hex-engraved crystals that powered their cities were leeches, sapping the world’s energy. Below ground the leylines had become veins of enormous energy, the rock and the magma teeming with tiny life – earthflow: a world’s weight of it – the soul of the earth, breathing, sighing, pained by the coarse manipulations which the old gods were weaving through the gaps in the wall of reality.

  And there was something else she could sense – on the surface, not underground – something pure and deadly stalking the earth. It was well hidden, but, however hard it screened itself, to the earth the entity’s invisible passage was like the tip of a knife teased across her sensitive skin. Molly was becoming a butterfly, but her body, her chrysalis, was still there to remind her of the urges of the race of man. She realized she was starving. Without thinking she changed course, led herself and Slowstack out of the tunnel they were following – an old micro-atmospheric connecting the estate of a Chimecan priest lord to one of their cities – and through a crevice in the wall into a cavern.

  Above them buildings grew down from the ceiling like stalactites, tiered inverted ziggurats. Stone streets divided the cavern floor, raised, and – apart from the cracks of age and ceiling falls – so well preserved that it was easy to think the Chimecans had just left the city a couple of minutes ago. Fields of swaying stalks with bulbous heads grew in the shadows of the raised streets, a clear crystal pyramid in the centre of each field flaring up as lightning forks exchanged between their tips and the ceiling crystals above; energy drawn from the earthflow and dispersed by the pyramid structures to the crops.

  Molly sprinted along one of the empty streets towards the pit-like fields. ‘Food, Slowstack, a whole cavern of it.’

  The steamman accelerated to keep up, his tracks crunching the dusty flagstones. ‘Molly softbody, you must not feed from this.’

  She waved at the pits, the tall crops shivering as they sucked energy from the pyramids. ‘The crops have been waiting here for a thousand years. Nobody is here to stop us.’

  ‘Use your senses, Molly softbody. Touch the stalks with your mind, feel all of the crop’s essence, not just its surface.’

  She did as the steamman bid and recoiled in disgust, fighting to keep from gagging. Her hunger had vanished.

  ‘If you fed from this crop you would end up like Tzlayloc, Molly softbody, mad and consumed with a terrible unending hunger. When the coldtime came, the states that would become the empire of Chimeca fed their masses with the most abundant resource their flesh mages had to draw upon.’

  ‘People,’ said Molly. ‘Sweet Circle, those crops used to be people.’

  ‘It was simple to change their pattern using the empire’s dark sorceries,’ said Slowstack. ‘There were millions on the surface who would have died from the cold anyway. The imperial legions took the seed crop as tribute from the nations of the surface.’

  She could see it now. Legs, arms and body fused into a single stalk, the indentations on the bulb where a face used to be, their essence blended with moss and lichen so they could divide and be fruitful. For a hundred generations this harvest of people-plants had grown in the artificial light of a fallen empire, fed by the life force of the rotating world. The people-plants were not just the descendants of her race, either. Some of the fields had been graspers, lashlites and craynarbians; the Chimecans needed variety in their diet. No wonder the Hexmachina had abandoned the contemptible race of man to warm her body in the core of the earth.

  ‘These plants may be unfit to consume, Molly softbody, but the water that feeds them will be drawn from the fallen empire’s holds under the seabed, purified by miles of filter glass. We need to replenish our boiler system, as do you.’

  The steamman led them down the raised street to a ramp cut into the stone. Molly did not want to enter the field pit, but her thirst got the better of her. Row upon row of the fleshy plants lay formed up in front of her, the green skin of their stalks felted in a light covering of fur, the bulbs crowned in a husk that had looked like an acorn shell from a distance, but appeared like a matted crust of human hair now that she was closer.

  Slowstack discovered the reservoir mouth feeding the irrigation channels, a statue in the shape of a swollen beetle. He opened his panel and drained as much water from the emerald beetle carving as his tanks would allow. Molly had been relying on his boiler for her water, so now she took the opportunity to slake her thirst. The liquid was as cold and as pure as any water she had tasted above ground – a cut above what came out of the taps in the public baths of Middlesteel for sure. Her feet crunched on something on the ground; Molly bent down to examine it. There was a scent on the husks. Where had she smelt that musk before?

  ‘Slowstack…’

  The steamman shifted his attention from the flow of water and towards Molly.

  ‘Slowstack, if we are alone down here, why are there dried husks broken up next to the water supply?’

  ‘We fear there is no reassuring answer to that question, Molly softbody. Let us leave as quickly as we can.’

  Slowstack was halfway up the ramp of the harvest pit when a bolt of energy cut past his torso and ricocheted off a pyramid in the next field over, the dispersion mechanism singing in anger and burning the people-stalks nearby with a storm of lightning. At the other end of the cavern two figures were leaping down stairs leading from the inverted ziggurats, their bodies glowing with a black radiation, radiant with the hideous glory of the Wildcaotyl. Their hunters!

  ‘The crevice,’ called Slowstack, his voicebox tinny at its maximum volume. ‘Back to the tunnel.’

  ‘No, Slowstack.’ Molly pulled the steamman back down the ramp. ‘If you trust me, old steamer, then follow me now.’

  She sprinted along the walls of the pit then ducked through the irrigation channel, submerging herself below the surface of the cold water.

  ‘Molly softbody, have you taken leave of your senses?’

  She climbed out of the channel, her clothes soaking. ‘Through the plants and out of the cavern at the other side.’
>
  ‘That is the longest route out of the chamber.’

  She grabbed his manipulator hand. ‘I know.’

  Her feet tingled as they plunged into the harvest, the energy feeding the people-plants through the soil grid trickling up into her legs, making her calf muscles prickle and twitch. Stalks sprang back from the steamman’s tracks, the bulbs swaying in mute agony above her head as the two of them carved an impromptu path through the crops. They lost sight of the pit walls and the raised streets, but Molly trusted Slowstack’s metal-born navigation sense to keep their path true.

  To their left the bulbs of the plants erupted in a shower of fleshy pulp as an ebony bolt from one of their pursuer’s glowing fists expended its violence. The two convicts were firing blind and the Chimecan crops were absorbing the worst of it.

  ‘I’m going to hold you down, girl,’ shouted one of the hunters, his voice still faint in the distance. ‘Push you in the dirt while I chew pieces of your flesh off.’

  Another bolt sent a cloud of stalk heads flying into the air.

  ‘Faster, Molly softbody.’ Slowstack’s vision plate was flaring as the nearby pyramid’s energy disturbed his own mechanisms.

  ‘You keep on shouting,’ muttered Molly to their pursuers. ‘Work yourself up into a nice hot sweat.’

  The crops fell back. They had reached the far side of the plantation pit. Slowstack seized Molly and with a sudden burst of acceleration mounted the slope of the pit and sent them into the air over the raised roadway, landing with a crunch of protest on the street as his track-treads cycled in fury. Molly glanced back towards the plantation. The pair of convicts were two-thirds of the way across the harvest pit, oblivious to the vectors of swaying crops arrowing in on their position.

  ‘Molly softbody, we—’

  ‘Wait a second,’ said Molly, brushing the water from her dripping red hair.

  A clamour rose from the crops, a clucking of rattle-like clicks, followed by a storm of white furred bodies leaping towards the men.

  ‘Wild pecks,’ said Slowstack, his head tracking the hunting cries of the lizard mammals.