The Court of the Air

by Stephen Hunt

  Attracted by the blood frenzy more packs of the albino creatures were pulling themselves from the neighbouring harvest pits and drumming the flagstones with the wicked-looking claws on their right feet. They were clever, cleverer than the outlaws of Grimhope had realized. Molly could feel the waves of information contained in that drumming. These packs nested in the tunnels, near-blind, but all too aware of the value of the crop of meat tended by the Chimecan automatics. Nothing must be allowed to intrude on their rightful territory.

  In the plantation they had climbed out of, a shockwave of energy blasted out, setting the crops burning, the bulb heads exploding in the heat. One of the hunters had fallen, the forces of his Wildcaotyl possession scything out in his death throes. The other would be snowed under by the albino killers before long.

  In the heat of the deep caverns Molly’s clothes were going to dry out quickly. She would be sweating again too, soon. ‘Let’s press on, Slowstack.’

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Prince Alpheus was dragged shouting to the cross and strapped onto the cold stone. ‘Leave my arms alone, we had a deal – I helped you jiggers.’

  ‘And so you shall help us again,’ said Tzlayloc. ‘And you need not worry about us removing your arms, compatriot. Symbolic gestures were needed when the old regime required the passions of the mob to be diverted. I have more direct ways of controlling their fervour.’

  The prince tried to turn his head to look at the crystal full of bubbling blood. ‘What’s that? What are you doing?’

  ‘It is a lens to amplify your nerve endings. Now be silent, lest you wear yourself out. You will need all of your strength soon. As it is, I suspect you will not last as long as my darling girl.’

  ‘You said you would set me free!’

  ‘I did, didn’t I?’ said Tzlayloc. ‘And by a strange twist of irony, compatriot, it is you who will set the people free with your blood.’

  ‘I am not a royal any more,’ sobbed Alpheus. ‘I abdicate – I told you I would. You can have the throne. I just want to go to the Fey Free State.’

  ‘It is not your royal blood which I require,’ said Tzlayloc. ‘How curious that Greenhall has no record of there ever having been a joining between the House of Vindex and your line, and more curious still that no one with the blood curse ever surfaced in the royal breeding house before. Still, that is what comes of letting you filthy vermin interbreed without proper supervision.’

  ‘What blood curse? I am not under any curse. Let me go, please, for Circle’s sake.’

  ‘The symbolism of your place in history shall be different,’ said Tzlayloc. ‘Not a valorous angel of the proletariat giving her life for the cause. Instead, the last peg of tyranny who needed to be dragged down to seal our courageous new realm.’

  The locust priests finished securing Alpheus to the stone cross and nodded to the Chairman of the First Committee.

  ‘I want to leave the palace,’ screamed Alpheus. ‘I want to leave Middlesteel.’

  ‘You are not in Middlesteel any more, compatriot. When we are finished we’ll find you a suitable place at the museum, stuffed, next door to an example of a mill owner. The last King of Jackals, uncrowned.’

  ‘Please, you promised—’

  Tzlayloc looked at the locust priests. ‘By all means stop his whining. My head is starting to ache with it.’

  The priests traced sigils on the activation glass and Alpheus’s howling filled the subterranean chamber.

  ‘That’s better.’

  Behind the prince the blood of the last of the operators boiled in fury, joining him in his agony. Tzlayloc nodded in satisfaction. Somewhere below, that filthy machine would be writhing in suffering too. Even if poor Molly Templar had not yet given her life to the cause, there were only two operators for the Hexmachina to distribute its essence between. One fleeing for her life, the other having his life crushed out of him.

  His smugness turned to dissatisfaction as he caught a glimpse of himself in the reflection of the blood crystal. He was getting corpulent. He looked at the locust priests and noticed for the first time that so were they. It was all the run-offs from the equalization mills; that and the harvest of hearts from the new Gideon’s Collars. With so many offerings to the Wildcaotyl it was hard to resist sampling some of the nourishment. For a moment the consideration that it was an inequality for him and the shepherds of the faith to have so much briefly suggested itself to Tzlayloc, but then the thought passed. Theirs was a heavy vocation with heavy demands – their bodies needed a heavy fuel to keep them in the condition that the revolution required of them. It was strange, though, how the more he ate the hungrier he became. He would have the Chimecan device moved to Parliament Square, into the light, Tzlayloc decided. He would feel better when he could watch the agony of the last monarch of Jackals from the windows of the House of Guardians.

  Alpheus’s scream changed pitch as the machine sought to surprise him with its ingenuity, varying the play of torture across his body. Tzlayloc ruffled the prince’s hair. So short, so lank and dreary compared to Compatriot Templar’s long fiery tresses. Everyone was doing his and her bit. Everyone had a purpose in the new order. Even a filthy royalist.

  Relieved of their weapons, Oliver, Hoggstone and Commodore Black sat in a chamber made surprisingly homely given its location in a long-abandoned atmospheric station. Only the presence of the outlaws armed with old rifles and crossbows pointing at them gave away the fact that they were not sitting in a gentleman’s library.

  Benjamin Carl wheeled himself into the room and navigated his wheelchair up to a table adorned with an old double-headed brass oil lamp. His head shone in the light, a slight silver tonsure all that was left of the ageing revolutionary’s hair.

  ‘Now then, fellow,’ said the commodore. ‘Do you plan to torture us? I see no wicked thumbscrews on your table.’

  ‘Torture? I used to regard having to listen to Hoggstone’s Purist friends campaign from the stump as torture. No, I thought we might have a nice pot of caffeel. Damson Barbary, if you would be mother.’

  The girl who had betrayed them ducked out of the library, returning with a steaming porcelain pot and four cups.

  ‘Time has been kind to you, Carl,’ said Hoggstone. ‘For someone I believed was dead up to a couple of weeks ago. Apart from the bath chair…’

  Benjamin Carl slapped the iron spokes of his wheels. ‘Age didn’t put me in here, First Guardian. Some rogues more or less on your side of the political debate abducted me. I had to jump from a round black aerostat and the landing was not kind to me.’

  ‘The secret court? And here’s me thinking they were an old politician’s tale spun to keep me on the straight and narrow. You always did have a devil’s luck, Carl.’

  ‘They’re real enough.’ The old revolutionary indicated the walls of his domain. ‘And you’re sharing my luck now, First Guardian. You in your pauper’s rags smelling of garbage, while the Third Brigade strut around Middlesteel’s avenues in parade formation.’

  ‘The Commonshare are your children, Carl. Does your heart swell with pride when you see what they have accomplished?’

  Benjamin Carl swivelled his chair to pull out a book from one of the shelves. ‘Community and the Commons, a first edition. Priceless on the black market since you banned it.’ He hurled the book at Hoggstone. ‘You tell me, you Purist cretin, you tell me where it says in here that we should set up camps to steal children and raise them away from their parents, that we should line up the people of a nation in the shadow of a Gideon’s Collar, that one state should invade another, that we should employ a mob of ruffians to kick down doors and drag people to flesh mills. You find where I wrote that!’

  Hoggstone picked up the book and waved it back at Benjamin Carl. ‘The words might not be in there, Carl, but that’s what it takes to impose your perfect beehive of a society on people who are born on their own, die on their own and live their lives by the one and one.’

  ‘We may be born on our own in
to the world, Purist, but there’s no immutable law of nature that connects a piece of land or strings a birthright to a swaddling. We are born into a world that belongs to all of us equally.’

  ‘That’s just a fancy letter of marque for a highwayman, Carl. Your community is a licence for those who have spent their lives idling to ride up to the farmer breaking his back in the field and demand a fair share of the harvest at the point of a sabre.’

  ‘I’m wasting my time with you, Purist,’ shouted Carl.

  ‘Give me back my debating stick, sir, and I’ll give you the lesson your people didn’t have the guts to learn at the ballot in 1566.’

  Oliver interposed himself between the two quarrelling men, his pistols back in his hands – the outlaw who had been holding them along with Hoggstone’s debating stick incredulous that the brace of guns had disappeared out of his grasp. Two of the crossbow men loosed their bolts; Oliver tossed a pistol in the air, turned and watched one bolt thud into a bookcase – he caught the other bolt and slammed its metal head into the desk, the quarrel quivering, before catching the pistol and filling the room with his demon’s laugh.

  ‘Time for that cup of caffeel, Ben Carl,’ said Oliver. ‘You haven’t gone to the trouble of bringing the First Guardian here to discuss political philosophy.’

  ‘Who are you, compatriot?’

  ‘I am the people you two buffoons claim to be working for.’

  ‘And you don’t want to be upsetting the people, now,’ pointed out the commodore.

  ‘Perish the thought,’ agreed Carl. ‘It hasn’t escaped my notice that the parties have put aside their differences and are working together now. I thought you might consider a … wider alliance?’

  ‘With you?’ said Hoggstone. ‘Dear Circle, man, I thought you would be cock-a-hoop – in case you haven’t noticed, it’s your people strutting about up on the surface now.’

  ‘Jacob Walwyn was a brilliant scholar, Hoggstone. The best student I ever lectured. When I first knew him he was a gentle man who spent his Circledays teaching poorhouse foundlings how to read. After sixty-six he endured two weeks of beatings and torture from the political police. Not in official custody, mind. He was in the hands of one of your patriot squads. After he escaped the price on his head was second only to mine. Which of us, I wonder, taught the man who now calls himself Tzlayloc his lessons best?’

  ‘Your agitators nearly started a civil war in Jackals,’ said Hoggstone. ‘Across the border Quatérshift has been bathing in the blood of your legacy for a decade. Why, sir, should I sign a pact with the devil?’

  Carl filled one of the porcelain cups and offered it to the First Guardian. ‘For the same reason I must, compatriot Purist. I would not suffer your tyranny, but Tzlayloc’s is infinitely crueller – the more repugnant to me that he seeks to dress it up with his twisted rendering of the communityist truth. Neither of us on our own is strong enough to overthrow them, but perhaps together… did you ever really read my book, Hoggstone, before you threw it on the fire?’

  ‘Your damn philosophy has been nothing but a plague on my house,’ said the First Guardian. ‘Of course I did.’

  ‘Do you remember the last line of it?’

  Commodore Black lifted up the tome from the table and turned the pages to the end. ‘Strength has no meaning unless it is used in the service of the weak. One stick may be snapped but the bundle is a community, and the community will never break.’

  ‘An alliance with a Carlist,’ said Hoggstone. ‘The House of Guardians will have me impeached after this. How many loyalists do you have?’

  ‘I have a whole city full of them, First Guardian. It is time for the voice of the people to be heard again.’

  Hoggstone lifted his cup. ‘To the people, you communityist dog.’

  ‘To the people then, you Purist slave master.’

  Oliver nodded in approval and holstered his two belt pistols. Hoggstone looked at him as he made ready to leave.

  ‘Shootist, this is a historic moment. Where are you going?’

  ‘Where else when the lunatics have taken over? I am going to pay a visit to the asylum.’

  Molly was beginning to wish that she had drunk more water when she’d had the opportunity. Every hour they travelled the heat seemed to get more oppressive, sapping her ability to keep up the pace. It was only the increasing strength being channelled by her proximity to the Hexmachina that was allowing her to continue. She had tried riding on the back of Slowstack’s hull but the metal of his surface had become scalding; she could have fried a side of ham across the steamman’s body if she had one.

  There was water somewhere, still being drawn through hidden cooling channels by the Chimecan crystals that survived this far down. She could tell by the haze of mist that filled some of the rooms. The extra burden of functioning this deep meant the crystals had fared far worse than the ones in the Duitzilopochtli Deeps. Many had melted or fractured under the strain of the heat, entire chains of the devices split open like hatched eggs. Bony glass splinters littered the floors of the passages where they had exploded.

  Molly slowed down. On the passage wall were lines etched in stone, oblong shapes with stone circles inside them. She imagined a reservoir behind the wall, as cold and as cool as the irrigation waters that had fed the people crops in the higher cities.

  ‘Let’s stop, Slowstack.’ She hit the wall. ‘We need water before we drop.’

  Slowstack came back to her, his stack spotted a fierce orange where the metal was overheating. ‘We understand, Molly soft-body, but we must continue. We are so close now.’

  She hit the wall again. ‘There’s water behind here.’

  ‘No, Molly.’ He traced his manipulator arm over the sigils carved in the stone. ‘This is not a coolant pipe. This is a sink for draining away the pressure of the magma that the earth passes this deep within her body – liquid fire and earth, Molly softbody. These are escape vents in case the channels overload.’

  Molly groaned and sunk to her knees to rest. ‘How could the Chimecans bear to live down here?’

  ‘Their coolant mechanisms had not suffered from a thousand years of neglect, Molly softbody. And the heat was valuable; it could be passed through exchangers and used to help keep the nations of the surface subservient to the empire during the harshest years of the coldtime. They needed their cattle – their slaves and food stock – kept alive.’

  Reluctantly Molly continued to follow the steamman. The caverns they passed through were smaller now, some of the ziggurats and stalactite towers unfinished, abandoned during the Chimecans’ twilight years. A twilight her ancestor had helped inflict on them. Increasingly their passage was blocked – halls where stone fire doors had been triggered by magma breaches ahead, corridors that ended in unfinished caves.

  In one of the dead-end caves there was a pile of bones so old they crumbled to dust when she tried to pick them up. There was no armour, Chimecan jewellery or scraps of clothes as with the other skeletons she had seen, but there were some links from an old leg chain. ‘A work gang,’ said Molly. ‘Digging out a new city for their masters, poor souls.’

  ‘We suspect not,’ said Slowstack. ‘There is no way forward here, we must go back.’

  Molly trudged after the steamman as he reversed his tracks. ‘But there are chains back there?’

  ‘Only the upper cities were dug with slave labour, Molly softbody, when life on the skin of the world was more populous and there were millions to be discarded digging out the caverns. The bones you saw were not tunnellers; they were a tribute of food, minerals in their body a delicacy for a whitegnaw, created by the flesh mages of Chimeca. The whitegnaw was the miner. Those poor softbodies were merely a plate of sweetmeats sacrificed to her.’

  ‘You have seen this thing, Slowstack, back when you were Silver Onestack?’

  ‘All the great rock tunnellers are female, Molly softbody. They split in two before they die; the aged self expires and the daughter self burrows on. You need not be concer
ned, the Hexmachina has hunted down most of them for her lover, the Earth.’

  ‘Most of them?’

  ‘There is one whitegnaw that attacked Grimhope – she is old and canny and has evaded the Hexmachina; it is believed she was a Chimecan noblewoman who murdered her family and was sentenced to transformation into a rock worm for her crime. The outlaws’ legend says she decided she would never die and would keep her hunger alive long enough to outlast the empire and all its works.’

  Molly wiped the condensation off the steamman’s vision plate with the sleeve of her tattered dress. ‘She has certainly done that.’

  ‘Hunger is a terrible thing, Molly softbody. A hungry creature will forget its intellect, its morality and its gods – in its desperation, a hungry creature is capable of almost anything. The Chimecans were once not so different from your people. Such a life is to be pitied. Mass starvation drove them to terrible crimes, to worship terrible things.’

  ‘When the Hexmachina showed you how to fuse your two bodies together I think she left a little of her essence with you, Slowstack.’

  ‘She was with us, Molly softbody. Even when we were Silver Onestack, only once a desecration, a leper among the people of the metal. Now we are twice a desecration and she is still inside us. If we live through this the people of the metal will not believe it. That the holiest of machines has made a twisted desecration its instrument.’

  ‘They will believe it,’ said Molly. ‘I’ll have our part in this written into a Dock Street penny dreadful and send copies of it to King Steam until they sing your name in their hymns.’

  ‘And what will you call your fiction?’

  “‘The Terror of the Crystal Caves”,’ said Molly. ‘Except they’ll get my feelings wrong. They’ll have me being brave and valiant all the way through the story. Not scared and tired and so hot I might throw the whole thing away for a glass of cold water. Everything I do in the story will be because I planned it, not because I had no choice.’