The Court of the Air

by Stephen Hunt

  With the crack of a titan’s hammer on the earth the barrels of the gun-boxes flowered flame and flung their shells towards the chequerboard hulls of the aerostats. Some of the shells struck the airship’s gondola structures, smashing wood and metal, others tore holes in the hulls, the fabric of their catenary curtains left flapping in the wind. A few ballonets spilled into the air, the gas cells floating out of sight. Not even slowed, the aerostats continued to glide across the fields of Rivermarsh.

  Black nodded sadly. History was repeating itself. It was just the same as when the RAN had raided his fleet of royalist privateers. You could pierce their hulls with ball, with shrapnel, hit them with fire, but the cursed vessels were almost indestructible. Celgas did not burn, and each aerostat was filled with thousands of ballonets, each man-sized canvas sphere swelled fat with the precious lighter-than-air substance. Puncture one with shrapnel and they still had a hundred more to lift them out of the range of enemy guns.

  King Steam’s monster shells had failed and now their forces would be flattened, crushed without the option of slipping away beneath the deep waters of the ocean. The Duke of Ferniethian cursed his luck.

  On the bridge of the RAN Hotspur, the revolutionary commander of the vessel pointed a discipline rod accusingly at the metal-flesher who had once been a first mate of the Royal Aerostatical Navy. ‘It is as I said, we should be running higher, Compatriot Ewart. We should be dropping our fin-bombs from a greater altitude.’

  Ewart flinched as the pain stick passed his iron chest. ‘We need line of sight for the fin bay crew. A turn of the wind and we would be dropping fins on your people – this snow is working against us.’

  ‘This is more of your defeatist whining and sabotage. I do not want to listen to excuses, compatriot. I have had a bellyful of them from your crew.’ The revolutionary officer turned to one of his soldiers. There were as many shiftie marines and brilliant men on the RAN Hotspur as equalized sailors, getting in the way and issuing contradictory orders. It was a wonder the aerostat could hold a true course with the skeleton crew that had been assigned to each ship, let alone clear for action. ‘Take Compatriot Ewart and a crew of patchers to the larboard hull. I want full lift – any damage from the Free State’s gun-boxes must be repaired at once or there will be consequences.’

  With four shiftie marines in tow, wet navy lubbers who didn’t know one end of a stat from another, Ewart followed the howl of the wind to the breech in the aerostat’s curtain. He tethered a holding line around his iron waist so he could climb securely around the ballonets and inspect the damage.

  ‘How many patchers are needed?’ shouted up one of the marines.

  ‘The netting is torn,’ said Ewart. ‘We need to—’ he stopped as he found the shell still buried in the ballonets, its metal buckled against one of the larboard girder stays.

  It had not detonated and Ewart tapped it. This was his chance. If he could detonate it he could bring down the Hotspur and take some of these dirty shifties down with him. But it was not crystal-fashioned, so how could it be filled with blow-barrel sap? As Ewart felt the lines of the weld on the shell, metal plates sprung out and he fell back towards the torn curtain flapping in the gust from outside, a garbled cry issuing from his voicebox as he jerked on his support line and hung helplessly in the air.

  The Quatérshiftian marines laughed at him, thinking he had tumbled clumsily off the aerostat’s hull frame, still unused to the quirks of his new equalized body. Their laughter was cut short when the steamman dropped down to the repair gantry, a round sphere sporting six pincer-sharp legs and an armoured dome for a head with a pressure repeater protruding from it like a mosquito proboscis. With their rifles slung around their shoulders the marines did not stand a chance – the six barrels of the steamman’s nose spun around and a whining blizzard of small iron balls tore the soldiers to pieces, their corpses flopping off the gantry and into the ballonets. The steamman turned its attention to the ballonets, unleashing a wave of fire into the leather gas sacks. The lift bags exploded, deflating and leaking sweet-smelling gas into the cold air of the airship’s interior. Then the steamman – actually a mu-body of one of the slipthinkers below – swivelled its pressure repeater in the direction of the laughing metal-flesher.

  ‘Sharply done, mate,’ said Ewart. ‘I don’t mean to knock the gilt off the gingerbread, but you’ll be here all day if you’re trying to sink the Hotspur that way.’

  On the ground the steamman slipthinker evaluated the facts in a fraction of a second. Equalized Jackelians were heavy, weight an aerostat could ill afford. Their presence indicated sailors captured at Shadowclock rather than revolutionaries. The slipthinker translated what the metal-flesher had said – knock the gilt off the gingerbread, an expression of nautical origin meaning to cut a tale short. The slipthinker controlling the mu-body made a snap decision and a pincer snaked out and cut down the iron body.

  ‘That’s it, mate. Now let me give you a black dog for a white monkey and show you where the Hotspur’s rudder lines are,’ said Ewart, picking himself up from the gantry. ‘And then we can visit the fin bay and drop a few shifties down onto their friends below.’

  The information raced across the slipthinker council, fleeting from mind to mind like lightning before passing back into the mu-bodies already on the airships as well as those being loaded into the gun-boxes.

  Metal-flesher and steamman warrior vanished together into the bowels of the aerostat. There was work to be done.

  Earth and flame spouted across the snowy plain as Oliver’s sixer held to the direction he was urging her; the new steed he had stolen was raised in a Jackelian cavalry regiment and thought little of the thunder and chaos of war, while the Whisperer’s gypsy horse just followed because there was a friendly tail in front.

  Riding through the confusion of the aerostat bombardment it was hard to tell which way to head. It was only the press of the fey – the concentration of the Special Guard – that allowed him to home in on the eastern flank of the battlefield.

  A Jackelian soldier bearing a standard showing the parliamentary colours staggered past, shouting encouragement to a body of troops that was no longer following him. Two of Ben Carl’s rebels dragged a third man through the snow, shouting for the surgeon’s tent. Oliver pointed to the way he had come but they ignored him and blundered forward towards the Third Brigade’s guns. The man they were dragging was dead. Oliver tried to call out to the pair but cannon smoke had swallowed them.

  A square of Jackelian infantry emerged from the carnage, their myriad shakos and tunics bearing testament to the fact that theirs was a motley assemblage of soldiers thrown together from the fall of Middlesteel.

  An officer in the centre of the square called out to them. ‘Have you seen the shiftie exomounts?’

  ‘We haven’t come across them,’ Oliver called back.

  ‘Watch out, there’s a squadron of them riding around here. Lancers.’

  The officer started to say something else but a bullet took him from the front and felled him to the ground in the centre of the square – the Jackelians looking in horror at their crumpled lieutenant. From out of the snow a banshee howl preceded a mob of fleeing soldiers, not a charge, but a retreating tumult. Jackelians. The aerostat bombardment had finally broken the army’s spirit. Some of the men on the edge of their square peeled off the formation and sprinted away with the deserters, their red tunics easy prey for any passing lancer.

  ‘Hold the line!’ Oliver shouted. ‘Hold the line!’

  They ignored him, hardly hearing his shouts in their terror and desperation.

  ‘The sky,’ shouted the Whisperer. ‘Look at the sky.’

  Many of the aerostats had fallen silent, drifting higher as if their control lines had been severed, but it was what lay beneath them that stopped the routed soldiers in their tracks. Long trails of smoke and snow cloud had formed into sword-carrying spectres, flowing around the aerostats with the elongated outlines of lions running by their sides.
It was as if the heavens had opened and the soul of Jackals had spilled from the sky.

  ‘The first kings!’ roared the Whisperer. ‘The first kings have returned.’

  All over the battlefield heads looked up and saw the ghostly army passing across the sky. Riding officers slipped in their saddles, brawling soldiers caught a glimpse of the sight and stumbled, sackpipers drew breath and their fierce sad music was stilled.

  * * *

  Next to Marshal Arinze, Tzlayloc raged at the Third Brigade’s troopers who had stopped loading their cannons to gawp at the sight. ‘It’s not real, compatriots. It’s not real. You fools, it’s not real!’ He clawed at his skull. ‘Get out of my head, get out of my head now.’

  ‘Our airships have been silenced,’ said Marshal Arinze staring upwards at the dark shapes gliding through the snow clouds. Stunned by the sudden hush he did not notice that Tzlayloc’s body was growing larger, the skin of the Chairman of the First Committee of Jackals swelling in uneven lumps as if beetles were breeding under his skin.

  Arinze clicked his fingers for a telescope from one of the staff officers. The aerostats had been holed by the steammen gun-boxes, but it was damage they could shrug off – how many times had he seen Jackals’ airships take their own weight in lead ball from his guns and still continue to wreak destruction on the ground? Too many to count. Aerostats were invincible, the floating angels of death of Jackals. Every time Quatérshift had clashed with its neighbour to the west the RAN had devastated their ambitions, and every time it was the terrible floating wall of Jackals that had laid waste to their place as the rightful masters of the continent. You could not lose with the aerial armada of Jackals behind you – that was an immutable law of warfare, of nature itself.

  Arinze turned to Major Wildrake, whose beautiful muscles filled out his Third Brigade greatcoat like rocks. ‘What can silence our aerostats, major? Nothing in the world can silence them!’

  Wildrake did not hear. He was hypnotised by the lions running through the sky, just like he had imagined as a boy, just like he had drawn so many times in pencil on his mother’s table.

  * * *

  To the east Oliver turned on his horse to look at the Whisperer.

  ‘So many minds,’ hissed the fey creature, the illusion of his human warrior’s body flickering. ‘Steammen, shifties, Jackelians. So different.’

  Around them many of the Jackelian soldiers had dropped to their knees, tears in their eyes at having allowed their fear to overcome them and turn them coward long enough to flee the front.

  ‘For the land,’ shouted Oliver. ‘For Jackals!’

  All around them the cry was taken up and the soldiers picked up their rifles and turned back towards the Third Brigade’s guns. Near the Whisperer the energy of the land had become inverted in an invisible vortex as his fey power disrupted the natural harmony of the leylines. Oliver grabbed the reins of the gypsy sixer and led them both away from the carnage and towards the press of fey he sensed.

  ‘No,’ said the Whisperer. ‘Leave me here. I need to concentrate. Everyone must see, everyone must see.’

  Oliver nodded and rode off. If the fortunes of war turned again and the Jackelians were driven back the Whisperer would as like be speared by some passing lancer or bayoneted by pursuing Third Brigade troopers.

  The eastern flank of the battlefield had lost any vestige of order – there were no columns, lines or formations manoeuvring for advantage in the intricate dance of infantry, artillery and cavalry; instead a sea of steammen knights fought, dotted with islands of Special Guardsmen, centaur-like warriors of the metal trading blows with the onetime protectors of Jackals. Away from the slaughter, a line of elite Third Brigade troops protected the worldsingers of Quatérshift. Like their brethren in Jackals they showed no taste for getting their hands dirty while their fey slaves could be marched into battle to die for them. They stood ready to activate the suicide torc of any guardsmen tempted to flee the battlefield.

  In front of them: the cruel theatre of the war. Voiceboxes vibrated with anger, the fighting screams of the orders militant breaking across fey bones where the knights could pin down the guardsmen. Standard-bearers lifted the Special Guard’s colours through the sea of deadly steammen, drawing attacks in wave after wave as the knights tried to seize the colours for their mountain halls. A steamman knight that could have been Steamswipe’s twin pulled himself past Oliver’s horse, his flank torn in half by a fey attack. Used to facing their enemies alongside each other, neither force had any strategies for fighting their former friends to fall back upon. It was the raw power of the feymist pitted against the physical strength of warriors who had been forged for battle. It was not warfare. It was murder being done here.

  Oliver knew what to do. It came to him without thinking, a remembrance of the people of the fast-time, the strange shades of the land beyond the feymist curtain. His human vessel vibrated with the power of that other realm, the part of him that belonged to his mother turning and recycling the building force. It grew and grew, the strain of it building dangerously high. Shouts sounded from the worldsingers minding the Special Guard who could see the ripples in the natural fabric of the world. They were pointing in Oliver’s direction. Every inch of his flesh was on fire, dimensions that could not exist on Jackals folding around his body, spinning, circling in impossible ways.

  By Oliver’s feet the damaged steamman was shaking, blue energy electrifying his juddering body, the unfortunate half-dead knight too close to the maelstrom. Bullets from Third Brigade marksmen passed through Oliver, lacking the match of reality to harm him. Oliver yelled in agony as the shockwave of ethereal energy lashed out, radiating across the fields of Rivermarsh in a blast that hammered over the steammen host, hurling fey guardsmen off their feet, sabres and pistols sent turning through the air. Steammen and Special Guardsmen staggered back to their feet, searching for the cause of the blast.

  Something had changed. Hands reached for throats, feeling the pale skin of their windpipes for the first time in years. Their torcs had disappeared, the hexed collars of slavery gone from the Special Guardsmen’s necks. They were free – the freedom that Tzlayloc had promised them and the Commonshare had stolen was their own at last … the freedom to choose, to decide who to fight for. Like hounds that had been beaten by a brutal master they turned on the Quatérshiftian line, the startled worldsingers still trying to activate the hexes that would slay the fey before they realized their slaves were no longer melded with the horrendous devices.

  The steammen knights seemed as bewildered as the Commonshare’s ranks by the sudden about-turn of the Jackelian feybreed. Oliver watched as a general was hefted skyward on a walking platform. It was Master Saw, his weapon limbs dirtier than they had been in the mountain halls of Mechancia, covered in blood and stack soot. He pointed northwest towards the heart of the Third Brigade’s formations and his hymn voice carried across the armoured heads of the orders militant, the song picked up by voicebox after voicebox. The steammen host veered off and arrowed towards the centre of the Third Brigade’s lines.

  ‘Our advance is stalled,’ reported the riding officer to Marshal Arinze. ‘The Special Guard have broken their torcs and fight against us.’

  Arinze glanced up nervously towards the chequerboard hulls of the fleet drifting uselessly in the wind, the rain of fire-fins replaced by a downpour of dead Quatérshiftian marines and officers. A corpse had actually plummeted down onto one of the cannons in front of him, the body’s uniform obviously torn apart by balls from a pressure repeater.

  Marshal Arinze tired to indicate to the scout that he should keep his voice down but it was too late. Tzlayloc had heard and stormed over, lifting the soldier from his saddle and crushing his skull as if it were a soft fruit.

  ‘There will be no retreat,’ Tzlayloc howled, dropping the limp corpse. ‘Victory is ours this day. It is written on the face of the earth.’

  With each piece of bad news the leader of the First Committee of Jackals grew la
rger, as if he was feeding off their despair. He was as tall as an oak tree now, his muscles unnatural and multiplying like the growths of a sickness.

  ‘It shall be as you say, compatriot chairman,’ said Arinze, staring up at the creature. And to think he had regarded the labyrinthine politics of Quatérshiftian revolutionary affairs of state as dangerous. A superstitious dread seized the marshal. It was one thing to call on the help of the deities – how many of his troopers still offered furtive prayers to the sun god while the political officers looked the other way? – but to become a god, that was something else again. Tzlayloc’s obsession was possessing him until it was hard to see where the man began and the Wildcaotyl ended.

  ‘Prepare the book,’ said Tzlayloc to his retinue of locust priests. ‘The book of Stinghueteotl.’

  ‘Is Xam-ku strong enough to be called?’ asked one of the priests.

  ‘I am Xam-ku!’ shouted Tzlayloc. ‘Do you not see how I am swelled by her grace? It is time for the Wildcaotyl to prove their fidelity to the cause. To seal the fate of these mill-master maggots and their Free State lackeys. Not a servant or minor calling, but the great ones – let them walk the halls of Chimeca again with their communityist brethren.’

  In the shadow of the command dome, King Steam turned to Coppertracks and his warrior mu-bodies standing sentry. ‘Prepare my war body, the time has come.’

  ‘The seers have thrown the cogs of Gear-gi-ju, Your Majesty,’ said Coppertracks. ‘The auguries are unclear, poor at best. The Loas are exhausted, many are withdrawing. We feed on light and order and I fear today is a dark day.’

  ‘Thousands of the people lay deactivate, Coppertracks, in the aberrant snow of our friends’ land. I will not abandon the light. I will not abandon a millennium of harmony and evolution to the laws of superstition and the malicious will of the enemy. I will not ask the knights steammen to support a cause I would not myself fight for. The old enemy prepares to walk our earth again and by the beard of Zaka of the Cylinders, I will meet him.’