by Stephen Hunt
Free, the commodore's favourite price. Molly followed him up the small winding stairs to the house's battlements. The top door opened with a squeak, and Molly emerged from between the two smoke stacks of their furnace room to stand by Tock House's balustrade.
'I have heard of these mad boys of Dennehy's Circus and I have always wanted to see them.'
Molly looked out. Below Tavistead Hill, the gardens and trees of Goldhair Park could just be seen as a splash of green far beyond in the centre of the capital. Sail riders were a mad breed at the best of times, taking to the air with their silk sails and kite frames. Any jack cloudie in the Royal Aerostatical Navy would tell you jumping from a wrecked airship was not something you did lightly. If the sail folded, failed to open or you landed badly, you were dead. Then add to that risk by being shot out from a cannon or having yourself strapped to an oversized firework to reach the giddying heights they sailed down from – well, that was plain madness. No wonder Goldhair Park was packing them in; Middlesteel's crowds were thronging the park to see men and women die in front of their eyes. The only reason Dennehy's Circus didn't put on more performances in a year was it took that long to gather enough performers suitably desperate and down on their luck to mount such a spectacle.
A signal rocket rose to explode in a cloud of yellow smoke, a dim cry of encouragement from the distant crowd barely perceptible out on the brow of Tavistead Hill. Molly and the commodore could hear the next sound, though; the faint boom of cantilevered cannons accompanied by the sight of the human cannonballs moving almost too fast to track. But the show wasn't over yet. Coordinated plumes of rocket smoke carrying a second wave of sail riders followed shortly after the cannon fire. Slowly to Molly's eyes – but no doubt at an incredible velocity to the sail riders concerned – multicoloured spears of rocket smoke passed from view into the clouds above the capital.
'We'll see them come down on their sails soon enough,' said the commodore. 'And it's a sight that wasn't always so blessed welcome to me. Have I told you of how the Quatershiftian men-o'-war used to winch sail riders behind their frigates, higher than any crow's nest, searching for the trails and periscopes of my privateer's u-boats?'
'Many times,' said Molly. She stretched on her toes for a better look. What kind of formations and high-altitude stunts would the sail riders put on for the crowds below? Commodore Black took a brass telescope from his coat pocket and pulled it open.
But the next sound Molly heard wasn't the soft susurration of the distant crowd as sail riders emerged from the clouds; it was the scraping of Coppertracks' treads as the steamman came up the stairs to the tower roof.
'I have news,' announced the steamman, his voicebox trembling with excitement. 'The observatory in Mechancia has communicated its findings back to me.'
'News about the disturbance in the heavens?' said Molly. 'How do your people explain new stars appearing while others are snuffed off your charts?'
'King Steam's scholars have devised a theory,' said Coppertracks. 'To formulate it, they consulted copies of pre-Camlantean texts so ancient there are none among you fast bloods who still have the knowledge of their translation. The theory suggests there is a cloud drifting through the celestial void, composed of a dark substance that is the antithesis of the very fabric of our universe. King Steam's scholars believe that if this cloud has been clearing in some places while thickening in others it would lead to the effect we have been observing: some stars vanishing while new ones appear to be born in the sky.'
Molly realized she had been holding her breath and let the air escape from her lungs. The sun and its life-giving warmth was safe, and perhaps her vision of the Hexmachina just a trick of a tired and overtaxed mind. Yes, that was it. What had she been thinking of? Molly laughed out loud. She had ridden the god-machine, joined with it once to cast down the dark gods trying to scuttle back into their world. Felt its incredible power. Of course nothing could seal up the Hexmachina like a ship inside a bottle.
Her relief was interrupted by a distant buzz of excitement from Goldhair Park. The sail riders were returning to the capital – but not in a coordinated display of multicoloured silks. Dozens of blackened bodies were plummeting from the sky, smudged smoke trails spiralling behind them.
'Their sails haven't opened,' shouted Molly. 'None of their sails have worked.'
The commodore put aside his telescope to take in the terrible scene with his own eyes. 'Ah, those poor brave lads and lasses. They're finished.'
The crowd's distant noise grew louder. Molly could imagine the astonishment among the ticket holders in Goldhair Park turning to screams as the corpses of the circus entertainers impacted among the watchers, at speeds fatal for the sail riders as well as any below they slammed into.
Coppertracks rocked on his treads, the energy in his transparent skull calculating the odds of so many sails failing to open at once. 'There is only one explanation: the cannon charges must have been overfilled by the circus, the riders killed by the velocity of their launch, fired too high into the firmament to breathe without a mask.'
'Then riddle me this, old steamer.' The commodore pointed to the second wave of sail riders – the rocket-launched entertainers – now returning through the clouds. Unlike the human cannonballs, their sails had successfully deployed, but their silks were burning up between their plywood frames. 'Did they fly too close to the sun?'
The second wave of performers was spiralling down, their silks an inferno. Even at their distance from the display, the three friends on the top of Tock House could see this was enough to finally panic the crowd into a complete stampede, a ripple that became a violent surge as the sightseers abandoned their once fought-over places for the relative safety of the streets outside the park.
'I simply do not understand,' said Coppertracks. 'I have never seen the like before. There are geysers of volcanic debris from the Fire Sea that erupt into the sky and could burn sail riders like this, but the flues of the Fire Sea lie many hundreds of miles north of us.'
Flaming masses were striking the capital now, some of the smoke trails lost among the pneumatic towers of Sun Gate. All ability to control their landing had vanished – a rain of dead circus men and women striking Middlesteel's streets. Finally, the sky was filled with the gentle fall of a thousand smouldering silk threads as the entertainers vanished out of sight. All save one, a tri-sail rider hanging limp as his mainsail was tugged by a side-draught while the glider's tail-sails crackled into nothingness; a side-draught that was dragging the contraption high above the streets of the capital and towards Tavistead Hill. Towards Tock House!
The dot grew larger and larger in the sky. Embers from the disappearing tail-sail finally ignited one of the mainsails and the rider frame began losing height rapidly, falling out of the wind's clasp above the capital. Down below, Coppertracks' mu-bodies were running out from the house, crunching the gravel of the path, swinging buckets of sand unhooked from the fire point of their boiler room. If the sail rider managed to avoid being impaled on the tip of the steamman's tower of science, then he was going to come down hard in their orchard. The three owners of Tock House were fast after Coppertracks' drones, joining the little iron goblins converging on the likely landing point.
Down to a single sail now, the flaming craft swung across the clearing where Coppertracks' celestial signalling apparatus stood spearing up towards the clouds. Then the rig blew into the line of pear trees, wrapping itself around the canopy of branches, burning silk billowing into dozens of pieces across the tree line. Where sheets of flaming material blew across the grass, the friends quickly extinguished them. Splintering, the main frame of the sail-rider rig folded in two, the limp mass of the rider swaying to a sudden halt, left hanging upside down from a tangled snarl of harness belts and sail pulleys.
Commodore Black pulled out a knife and shimmied up the tree to cut the pilot loose, Molly and Coppertracks waiting underneath to catch the body in the canvas rain cover they had pulled off the glade's small Porterbro
ok steam engine.
'The sail rider's a lad and he's taken some burns,' shouted the commodore.
'Is he alive?' Molly called up.
'He can count his lucky stars, but I believe the fellow is.' The commodore was sawing his way through the nest of ropes. 'His lucky stars and the fact that for all its bright rainbow colours, this sail frame is an old RAN chute. I can smell the retardant chemicals from his blessed burning silk, like bad eggs. Treated to exit a cannonshot-riddled airship when needs demand.'
With a final slice and a warning shout, the commodore cut the pilot free to flop down into their canvas. Molly pulled off a black leather glove from the pilot's hand and felt the wrist for a pulse. Yes, he was still alive, but in what shape was anyone's guess. 'Send for the doctor and make sure she turns up half-sober.'
'One of my mu-bodies is already on its way into the village,' said Coppertracks.
Molly rolled the pilot over. What she had first taken for part of the sail frame caught up on his back clearly wasn't. 'Look, a travel case! Why in the name of the Circle would you sail-jump with the weight of a travel case tied to your back?' She tried to open the case but it was locked. Damned heavy too.
Commodore Black landed down on the grass next to the pilot. 'A queer thing to do, but it saved his life. The weight of that case would have kept him at a lower altitude than the rest of his circus friends. Whatever ignited the others' sails only singed his poor head a little.'
Molly glanced up towards the firmament. Only the flat grey clouds of Middlesteel hung over the capital, but this carnage was no accident. The mystery of the disappearing stars might have been solved, but something else was deeply awry up in the heavens. The Jackelians were used to being masters of the sky. Their airships ruled the vaults of the firmament without peer or equal; a monopoly of aerial destruction that had long preserved their ancient kingdom from her many enemies.
But it appeared it was a monopoly no longer.
CHAPTER FIVE
It took a lot to recall the Jackelian parliament from its summer recess. The honourable members of the House of Guardians didn't collect much of a stipend from the state for their troubles, but at least they could usually rely on the long days of hunting, shooting and fishing on their estates. Estates that the members of the present Leveller government often lacked, so the grumbles went, hence their eagerness to recall parliament at the drop of a hat. The guardians' resentment at the interruption of their amusements was slowly bubbling over while the speaker of the house's lictors assembled the bones of King Reuben, his ancient skeleton dangling from a seven-foot staff of heavy Jackelian oak.
'Get a move on,' shouted one of the guardians, a ripple of agreement running across the benches.
'Order!' hissed the speaker.
With King Reuben's bones at last wired together correctly, the lictors formed a column, the master whip Beatrice Swoop at their head, and set off to march the last true king's remains around the floor of the house for the prescribed three circuits.
'Parliament shall not sit,' chanted the lictors, speaking for the bones.
'Says who?' roared the guardians, getting into the swing of the opening ceremony at last.
'Parliament will never sit again, by the force of my army,' recited the lictors, dangling the king's bones menacingly as they stamped across the wooden tiles.
All the guardians rose to their feet, pointing angrily at the bones of the once absolute monarch, slamming their canes on the benches in lieu of the heavy debating sticks that stood racked below. 'King of the Jackelians by our command, not king of Jackals. By the force of our army.'
'Ohhhhh,' moaned the master whip, running out of the chamber with the dead king's bones, the final customary call a lonely echo down the corridors outside. 'Sod this for a game of soldiers.'
'Parliament's writ runs supreme,' announced the speaker. 'Parliament is hereby declared open in a session most extraordinary. I call upon First Guardian Benjamin Carl to make the opening address.'
From the cabinet bench the first guardian pushed the wheels of his bath chair forward, occupying the podium of oratory. Carl tutted to himself. In the old days, the bones of King Reuben would have been borne through the streets of Middlesteel. Then the citizens of the capital would have tossed rotten fruit at them, a purse bearer from the treasury at Greenhall walking behind the skeleton with a bag full of copper pennies for any urchin who managed to detach the king's skull from the staff. But the expense of the public holiday and the disruption to commerce had led to the parade's abandonment some thirty years earlier. They were a modern people now, after all.
Carl cleared his throat. 'I have come before you many times over the last few years and asked for changes to the laws of Jackals that have been considered radical by many of my honourable colleagues and some editors of Dock Street.' He gave a little nod to the public gallery, packed with pensmen from the news sheets. 'So who am I to deviate from the front page editorial that the Middlesteel Illustrated News has no doubt already laid out on their composition board? I shall even raise the ante for their editors a little. It is my terrible duty to ask you today for the passing of perhaps the most radical bill of them all. As radical as the threat this land of ours now finds itself faced with. We must repeal, at least temporarily, the Statute of Splendid Detachment.'
'No, NO,' howled the opposition benches – worryingly, the cry appeared to be taken up by many members on Carl's own side of the house as well.
'There are reports circulating which cannot have escaped the attention of my honourable colleagues assembled here today, reports that have been carried back from our trading houses in the Catosian League. Reports that I can sadly confirm. Almost all of the Catosian city-states have now fallen.'
From the facing benches, the opposition leader Guardian Hoggstone came to his feet. 'The policy of splendid detachment has served this house well for seven hundred years. The study of history is a litany of conflicts raging into war across the continent and ever shall it be so. Are we to act as policemen to the world? You will find it an ungrateful business, sir. We have no mutual assistance pact with the Catosian League. Indeed, who in the anarchy is there to sign a treaty with? Where each citizen speaks for him or herself, with not a government worthy of the name. We would go into their land as liberators and be shot at as occupiers within the week, mark me well on this matter.'
Carl continued. 'We know of no nation to the north capable of defeating Catosia. An expeditionary force would allow us to gather information on the invaders and-'
'And it would cause the Jackelian people to become embroiled with every foreign intrigue and border dispute on the continent,' roared Hoggstone. 'A little bit of splendid detachment when it suits one is similar to one's daughter declaring she is merely a little bit pregnant for the afternoon. And I have read the developments in today's news sheets as well as you.' He flourished a copy of the morning's Illustrated. 'Quatershift has now been invaded from the north by the polar barbarians, this Army of Shadows the refugees speak of. Would you have us come to the shifties' aid too, send our redcoats outside of our borders to help protect the ancient enemy, compatriot?'
'Come to order, damsons and gentlemen, please,' yelled the speaker as the house descended into uproar.
'Carl by name, and Carlist by nature,' yelled a guardian from the Heartlander party.
The master whip's lictors slapped their coshes menacingly into their palms, trying to bring the frenzied politicians into line. Uncowed, the guardians hooted their rage and threw the remains of their lunch at the enforcers of the chamber's law. It usually paid to have a pocket stuffed with apple cores and half-eaten pies in parliament.
It was time for the First Guardian to play his trump card. 'There is a related matter which I have the grave duty of bringing to the attention of the house. Despite my honourable colleagues supposedly partaking of the many joys of the season's recess, you will no doubt be gratified to hear I already have a tray filled to the brim with complaints from the guardians assembl
ed here today vigorously protesting against the grounding of the aerostat fleet of the merchant marine. The announcement that Admiralty House issued – that all airships had been grounded for maintenance checks following the crash of the RAN Amethyst due to engines clogged with the dust-ridden rain left in the wake of Ashby's Comet – was falsified by cabinet order. By my order.'
Now the house really descended into chaos. They had been lied to, the First Guardian dared do this to them, the elected representatives of the people! A guardian from the Roarer party vaulted the opposition rail and tried to strike Carl across the head with her cane; but the lictors were all over her with their clubs, a tattoo of brutality drummed across her body until the politician slumped into unconsciousness.
'Banned from sitting in the house for a week,' pronounced the speaker from his perch, as the body was dragged to the infirmary by two footmen.
Carl grimaced. It would take twice as long as that for her wounds to heal. He looked at the pensmen and illustrators scribbling frantically in the gallery above. By the Circle, they would have their fun with this day. His voice rose above the bedlam. 'My order was not issued lightly, but to avoid mass panic while parliament was being recalled. The RAN Amethyst was never grounded, it was posted missing. Along with sixteen airships of the merchant marine that disappeared in a single evening. Yesterday, as those of you who were in attendance at Goldhair Park will have noticed, dead circus performers rained down from the sky. I think it is safe to assume that they were not killed by a noxious cloud of vapours widely adrift from the Fire Sea as the penny sheets have been speculating.'
'You are saying these events are connected?' asked Hoggstone, the leader of the opposition's face returning to a more normal shade now he realized how deeply his beloved Kingdom of Jackals stood threatened. Hoggstone's Purist party members took his lead and fell quiet by his side.
'I don't believe in coincidences,' said Carl. 'The Catosian League has collapsed. The north of Quatershift has been invaded. Our airships are being plucked from the sky without a trace like pigeons devoured by hawks. The order of worldsingers is reporting a consistent failure of its most basic sorceries. It is as if our strength, the strength of our great people, is being slowly sapped away by a fever. And who can this state of affairs suit? We have always feared a foreign nation would one day threaten the Jackelians' sovereign rule over our proud skies. That day has now arrived, and while it may be advancing towards us from the north, I doubt if the Army of Shadows comes in the guise of any barbarian horde.'
