by Stephen Hunt
'Your people have been trying to catch the wind with their fingers, Harry. You could toss me into one of your cells right now – you know what would happen next. One day someone in your armoury would open the vault where you'd locked away my guns and they wouldn't be there. They'd be in the hands of someone else wearing a hood and leading your agents a merry dance across the face of Jackals.'
Harry was about to reply when the door of the lifting room at the end of the corridor slid open, revealing a warder doing his hourly cell check.
The warder looked quizzically at the trolley, the cell number hooked around the front just as regulations required. 'What's Timlar Preston doing out of his cell? He's not due to be put under for a room sweep until the end of the week?'
'What does it look like?' said Harry. 'I'm a wolftaker, he's a wolf. I'm taking him.'
'I know who you are, Mister high-and-mighty Wolf Twelve. What I haven't seen are any release from custody papers for Timlar Preston.'
'Special orders,' said Harry. 'He's about to get time off for good behaviour.'
'You've got to be having a bloody laugh-' the guard's protests were interrupted by a klaxon, an urgent, intense burst of sound from the other end of the prison sphere.
'Proximity alarm,' announced Harry for Oliver's benefit. Not their prison break discovered, then.
'But we're well out of season for a skrayper attack,' noted the warder.
He walked to the other side of the corridor and rotated a handle, lifting a storm shutter off a viewing porthole. Something megalithic, grotesque, was slipping through the clouds, drifting past the aerospheres of the Court's city in the firmament. Brief gaps in the cloud cover revealed a wall of dark, rust-coloured metal peppered with jagged spikes and lit by savage bursts of red light.
'What in the name of the Circle is that thing?' sputtered the warder. 'It looks like it's riding a lightning storm!'
'Not a lightning storm,' said Oliver, glancing over the guard's shoulder at the strange craft. 'It's riding the leylines.'
Oliver could feel the power of it. A spike of raw energy leeched straight from the heart of Jackals below, lifting this monstrosity up, pushing a devil's cauldron into heaven's limits. It was like a bloated flying citadel, a hideous castle riding on the energy of the leylines.
'We're opening our gun ports,' said the warder, hardly believing what he was seeing. Apart from driving off the skraypers and other gas creatures, the Court's defences had never been used in anger. From somewhere inside the city a series of small aerostats emerged like angry hornets protecting their nest, then they were past the porthole and there was a thump-thump as they ran into the attacker's fire. A backblast of burning hull fragments bounced off the viewing glass, spinning ribs of hull skeleton windmilling past.
The warder noticed Harry rushing the handcart down the passage at speed. 'Hey!'
'What's the very best way to start a fight with your enemy?' asked Harry.
Running behind the cart, Oliver raised up two fingers. The two fingers he could use to push into an opponent's eyes, blinding them.
'Glad to see your time with me wasn't totally wasted.'
They nearly lost their footing as the corridor tilted, the handcart slipping across the floor with the impact of an explosion. Timlar Preston's restraining straps held him on the flatbed, but Oliver barely managed to escape having his legs crushed by the buggy. There was another explosion inside the Court of the Air. More distant this time, the impact taken by one of the spheres at the far end of the aerial city. The tenor of the klaxons changed, becoming a frantic hoot as Harry redoubled his efforts at dragging the cart forward, Oliver struggling to keep up.
'Will the lifting room to the hangar still be working?' Oliver shouted over the racket.
'Not in a minute's time,' called Harry. 'That's a separation alert.'
'Separation from what?'
'Our transaction-engine chambers have done the maths on trading blows with whatever the jigger that is out there. We're losing.' There was a rattle as a porthole next to them was covered with an iron grille sliding down the outside of the prison sphere. 'The Court of the Air is preparing to separate. Each sphere of the city becomes an independent airship and they scatter.'
Oliver gripped the handcart as the prison sphere began to list in the opposite direction. 'Scatter to where?'
'Damned if I know, this is the first time we've had to do it since I've been with the Court. There'll be a rendezvous point for anyone who makes it out alive.'
'Stop!'
Oliver looked around. It was the warder catching up with them.
'Get him back in his cell.'
'Why?' asked Oliver.
The warder stared at Oliver with contempt.
'He's just a cadet,' apologized Harry, abandoning the cart and moving back down the corridor. 'Wasn't so long ago that I slipped him out of Bonegate Jail to join us.'
The warder grabbed the handles of the handcart, pushing Oliver to the side. 'You think we're going to risk the prison sphere crashing into Jackals with fifty year's worth of captures? If this mob of rascals got out all at once, Jackals would be an anarchy within a year-' His words were interrupted by a muffled crash from down the corridor, followed by the pop of explosive compression. 'We're flushing out all of the prisoners, high category ones first, and they don't come much higher than Timlar Preston.'
Harry's hand slipped over the warder's mouth from behind, silencing him as he thrust a dagger through the man's spine. The warder arched violently and then slumped over Preston's comatose form. 'That's why I need him alive, old stick.'
'You didn't have to do that,' said Oliver.
'You're a fine one to talk. Of course I bleeding did,' said Harry. He pushed the corpse off Timlar Preston's unconscious form. 'Just like I'm going to have to drag him into an empty cell before it's flushed. Half measures won't see our people through today safely.' He snapped a chain of punch cards off the dead warder's belt. 'And he wasn't going to give us the keys to the guards' station if we'd just asked him nicely.'
An acrid burning smell reached Oliver's nose. That wasn't good. Just how badly had the prison sphere been hit? The rattle of explosions outside grew louder. Harry left Oliver to manhandle the prisoner gimbal forward while he slotted a red punchcard key into the guard station's lock. Ducking down to check inside before the armoured door had fully withdrawn into the ceiling, Harry waved his old comrade-in-arms forward. 'Nobody here. They'll all be up top in the main station, trying to work out which one of them has the most flight time on an aerosphere.'
Oliver had nearly gained the door when a series of detonations thunder-cracked in a timed sequence, then the floor veered off from under them, leaving Oliver holding the gimbal with one hand and the door with the other.
Harry staggered to the guard station's entrance and reached out to help pull Timlar Preston's unconscious form inside. 'Unfortunately, right now, I think that would be me.'
Oliver looked up. Those last explosions had been too measured to be part of the battle. Separation! Through an arc of glass in the guard station their perilous state of affairs stood revealed in its true horror. The Court of the Air had split into a hundred separate globes, many trailing smoke and flames, stabilizer rotors being reorientated into flight position, the rubber gangways and sealed corridors that had connected the aerial city drifting down now through the clouds like streamers at a country fair. Some of the spheres' gun ports were still firing, a few surviving airships looping through the carnage, razor prows thrumming uselessly with the power electric – their enemy today no pod of skraypers that could easily be repulsed with a few shocks. The vapour cloud cover generated by the city's vast array of transaction engines had cleared away sufficiently to reveal the passage of the executed prisoners; white trails like spider legs reaching out, thin lines of heated oxygen where the cells' decompression seals had been explosively blown. Every few seconds there was another pop and a new captive would be launched flailing – quickly stilled – into the air
less vaults of the upper atmosphere.
Oliver could no longer see the vast hull of the enemy craft, but he could feel the weight of their evil riding the leylines like a mountain balancing on an eruption of magma. Draining Jackals of her ancient lifeforce as they flew, turning the precious power of the land against those that they would conquer. The attacker's vessel was filled with soldier slats similar to the beasts he had slain outside Tock House's walls. He brushed their minds, glimpsing memories of their war craft's construction. It had been built by stripping the mountains of Catosia, levelling them to make a honeycombed cauldron of black rock, minerals sucked out by slug-like things and excreted as a trail of panels and girders in their wake. Oliver pushed past the slats' minds, trying to locate their masters' presence. No, there were only the soldiers of the Army of Shadows inside the citadel. Strange. Oliver recoiled in disgust as he probed their essence. They were foul – it was all he could do to hold back the urge to retch. Greed. Avarice. A stripped-down core of pure selfish loathing for anything outside of the Army of Shadows. Kill. Devour. Breed. All with a fierce, demented energy about them, locking this storm of locusts to their labours with an intensity so driving it burnt Oliver's soul to behold. It had been an age since the slats had fed properly. So many centuries since they'd had a green, fresh land to strip. There was something else, too. Amusement. Amusement at the clumsy collection of locked airships that had made up the Court of the Air – that something so ephemeral and weak and subtle could count itself the guardian of an entire nation. The slats piloting the flying citadel showed their contempt by drawing up the force of the land and reflecting it towards the toy spheres they faced. Great gobs of power flaring out and lighting the floating city up the way children might burn out a hornet's nest for the fun of it. Oh, how they loved to see the hornets burn.
Shaken by a massive impact, the prison sphere's floor dipped out from under Oliver and Harry's feet, leaving them suspended in the air for a second before spilling them back down to the floor. One of the instrument panels blew behind them; a shower of sparks falling over Timlar Preston's body. Harry cursed like a navvy, getting to his feet and struggling to spin a wheel on a hatch in the floor. 'The lifeboat is a tad cramped, but there's room for two if you drop down alongside him.'
Oliver looked at Harry.
'I may be a bastard, but I'm not a coward. This is my battle and I'm not leaving it to a bunch of lousy prison guards on an aerosphere to fight.'
'The Court's finished, Harry.'
'We're never finished. We might be folding this hand of cards on the table, but the great game never ends.'
Oliver dragged Timlar Preston's comatose form towards the lifeboat hatch. How many years had the Court hunted Oliver across the face of Jackals? Fearing him. Fearing the brace of pistols that had been handed down from generation to generation of those who had worn the mantle of the Hood-o'the-marsh. The Court. His implacable enemy. More cunning than the crushers from Ham Yard. More persistent than the cavalrymen from the barracks of the New Pattern Army. The Court of the Air had always been there. The unseen eye in the sky. Always watching. Always planning. How would the kingdom see without them? What future could there be without the carefully crafted path the Court was leading them down? Oliver was missing them already. Invisible and invincible no longer – just a collection of mortals tending the civil war's legacy of democracy, blown to the four winds on a motley squadron of high-altitude aerospheres.
Oliver lowered Preston into the lifeboat, a low moan escaping the scientist's lips as he banged his spine on the iron sphere's walls. Preston fell away and Oliver dropped his feet through the hatch. 'What is the enemy going to do next?'
'After they've blinded the realm by taking us out? Well, if it was me, there'd be a right good kicking coming for any Jackelian that tries to stop them invading.'
A tinny voice broke out from a speaking trumpet mounted on the console. 'Station twelve! Station twelve, we've been boarded. All hands to repel boarders on the lower levels. They're beasts; they're-'
Harry sighed and drew out the knife he had used to kill the warder, wiping the blood off on his trousers. 'No rest for the wicked.'
'Be careful. These things are called slats and they're fast and they take a lot of killing. Their throats are their weakest point.'
Harry watched Oliver climb down the lifeboat's ladder. 'You never did say what you wanted Preston for.'
'We're going to build a cannon. One big enough to shoot us to Kaliban.'
'You're-' Harry threw back his head and laughed. 'Well, Timlar Preston's your man, all right.'
Inside the confines of the cramped lifeboat Oliver pushed Preston to one side and slipped his left foot into the sail deployment pedal. 'Stay safe, you old thief.'
'That's what I do best, old stick. Though, from the sound of it, I rather think it's you who's going to need all the luck.'
***
With a clang the escape hatch shut, Harry spinning its lever tight. He slid the dead warder's master punch card into the console and there was a clacking from the clockwork deployment mechanism as the lifeboat was lowered out of the prison sphere's hull.
'You stay safe too, boy.' Harry pulled the firing lever, the crack of two charges blowing, and the first – and possibly the last – successful prison break in the Court of the Air's history was over.
A slippery clicking noise sounded from outside the warder station and Harry turned to see the flat eyeless skull-plates of the pair of ebony monsters that had tracked his scent along the corridor. Slats, damn slats!
'That was fast work, lads.' Harry showed them his blade. 'Well done. Now, which of you two ugly slime-dripping jiggers wants some first?'
CHAPTER SIX
Commodore Black indicated the sword rack and wiped the fat tears of sweat pouring down his forehead with the towel hanging there. Purity dropped her sabre into the wooden rail and borrowed the towel after the u-boat man had finished with it.
'You've a classic sense of blade work about you, lass. Some might say archaic.'
'Some might say unreliable,' replied Purity. 'This isn't anything to do with me. Until I came here I had never picked up a sword in my life before. If any of the children in the Royal Breeding House were caught fencing with broom handles we would be birched so hard we couldn't sit down for a week.'
'They want to raise sheep to wear parliament's tainted crown,' said the commodore. 'Not lions. Yet you fight as if you've been tutored in the arts of war all of your life.'
'Something's possessed me,' said Purity. 'My madness – whatever you want to call it. Every day it burrows a little deeper within me like a sickness, and it gets harder to tell where I begin and it ends.'
'If madness it is, it's a grand old sort. Your reflexes are getting steadier with each session. Cavalry sabre, fencing foil, debating stick, pistolry, cutlass. There are not many tricks of arms I have left to teach you. Nor, I dare say, any tricks of pugilism that mad strapping uplander Duncan Connor has remaining to pass on to you either. Just remember that the New Pattern Army fights dirty, and that you've your house's honour to carry with you.'
Purity looked around. The corpses of Kyorin's murderers might have been cleared away, but Purity could still feel the slats' lingering malevolence. 'I wish Oliver would come back. He seems to know what I am, to recognize the thing inside me.'
'Let him stay away, now,' pleaded the commodore. 'A day, a week, a month is good and a year would be better still. You've got parliament's warrant sitting on your escaped head to think about. That lad with his wicked brace of pistols draws trouble to him like wasps to a picnic. He goes off to visit the Court of the Air and the whole place comes tumbling down like a pack of cards. I could tell you tales of that lad, Purity Drake, and all the trouble he's got me into before now. Stumbling around the undercity and the sewers of Middlesteel, pursued by vicious killers. Marching across the fields of Rivermarsh while shiftie lancers tried to run my proud chest through with their steel and our own airships rained fin-bombs a
bout my head. If it hadn't been for my quick grasp of military matters directing the armies of the Kingdom of Jackals and the Steammen Free State, why, our nation would be a conquered province of Quatershift and we'd be nodding at each other in the street with a hello compatriot, this, and a how do you do, compatriot, that. Yes, that strange lad you're so keen to see again is fine for getting us into terrible scrapes, but it's old Blacky that everyone has to turn to to get us out of them.'
'I think whatever has been talking to me inside my head has been talking to him, too.'
'Well, I suppose it'd be a blessed release for us if he and Molly did come back early from the House of Guardians, for it'd mean Ben Carl had thrown them out, them and their mad plan for building a cannon to shoot Molly to the moon. I should have made an appointment an hour earlier than theirs, and used the jingle of every medal the First Guardian gave me after the battle of Rivermarsh to convince him to help keep my Molly's precious head safe on the soil of Jackals.'
'How can you say that?' asked Purity. 'You heard what Kyorin said.'
'Ah, the poor blue-skinned traveller. Torn apart and lying bleeding on the floor of Molly's bedroom. He was kind to you and no doubt a fine fellow for all the strange colour of his hide, but I've heard the dying words of a good few souls on my terrible adventures and they rarely make much sense. This wicked Army of Shadows is no doubt from one of the continents north of the polar wastes; I've seen stranger sights than your friend's eyeless monsters in the underwater cities of races such as the gill-necks, and crossed swords with far more wicked creatures in the jungles of Liongeli.'
'Either way,' sighed Purity, 'the Army of Shadows will be here soon enough. The news sheets are full of nothing but our new treaty with Quatershift and the war.'
'The sheep are lying with the wolves now, right enough. And I can think of one shiftie we'd be well rid of to start with.' The commodore pointed towards the window of their library. 'That twitchy devil Timlar Preston, insisting that nothing else but my finest brandies and wines will to do to comfort his genius and lubricate his plans for his damn fool cannon. If there was an agent left to seize the bugger, I would place a notice in the Illustrated's small ads and risk my address to the Court of the Air's rascals in the hope that Timlar Preston wouldn't be sitting in my house come the new day.'
