Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air

‘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 concerned, 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.’

‘You have had a choice, Molly softbody,’ said the steamman, ‘and you have followed your path and stayed true to it. There is no greater bravery than that. The Hexmachina showed us glimpses of a world where you did not — and it was a dark, cold, quiet, terrible place. Sometimes the fate of the land turns on the common actions of a common individual.’

‘I am not sure it should have been me, Slowstack. Out of everyone in Jackals, I keep on asking why this has fallen upon me. I’m just a Sun Gate scruff that everyone predicted would end up running the streets with the flash mob. Better this duty had fallen to an adventurer like Amelia Harsh or a handsome deck officer on an aerostat. I don’t have a family; I don’t even have a living. Out of everyone in the world, why me?’

‘The great pattern has woven your place in its fabric better than you know, Molly softbody,’ said Slowstack. ‘The blood of Vindex runs in your veins, not just in a literal sense — you are a true heir to his legacy. Out of all his descendants with the blood-song singing within their veins we can imagine no other we would rather have at our side.’

The last syllable of the steamman’s words was lost in the howl that echoed off the walls of the passage.

‘That is a softbody throat,’ said Slowstack.

‘Not merely the race of man,’ said Molly. ‘Those things are ridden by dirty Loas.’

She extended her senses, felt the rush of the Hexmachina’s voyage through the magma. The Hexmachina was at least an hour away from their position.

They started speeding away from the noise, but Molly was reluctant to flee, checking the path with her hands, looking for something.

‘Molly softbody?’

‘They are too near, Slowstack. They’ll run us down in minutes.’

‘I have no weapon capable of harming the Wildcaotyl,’ said the steamman. ‘Even a pair of minor entities. Are you joined yet with the Hexmachina?’

Molly shook her head. ‘We should save our strength, stand here and face them down.’

‘You can smell another pack of wild pecks?’

‘The only thing worth hunting down here is us , old steamer.’ She pulled him towards her. ‘By my side, Slowstack. Don’t try and throw yourself in front of me. No heroic sacrifices.’

Down the passage the two convicts rounded the corner, rolling in two spheres of black light suspended above the ground, their hands crackling with an incinerating fire. They sighted their prey and accelerated towards Molly and Slowstack with a howl which was a roar of triumph channelled through burning human throats.

‘This is chaos,’ shouted Oliver.

Third Brigade soldiers were falling back at the other end of the street in a disciplined line, one rank firing, while the troops who had retreated a couple of steps behind them reloaded from their bandoliers. On Nagcross Bridge equalized revolutionaries were being picked up by their iron legs by rebels and tossed into the Gambleflowers, political fighters running along the shops on the bridge and brandishing their debating sticks.

Commodore Black had one of the dead shifties’ carbines and he shot it with the accuracy of a long rifle, Third Brigade troops dropping with each charge he broke. ‘Use the cover, lad. Your fey skull will stop a bullet the same as any other.’

One of Benjamin Carl’s officers ran up to them, his only mark of rank a red band of cloth bound around his arm. ‘They’ve started putting pickets on the sewer gates, we can’t get our people behind them.’

‘The other bridges?’ asked Oliver.

‘Even better defended than this one.’

Nagcross Bridge had to fall. Oliver looked at the ranks of soldiers at the other end of the bridge. They were sheltering behind an interlocking wooden rampart — one of the mobile barricades they erected to seal off troublesome districts back in the Quatershiftian cities. As he watched a column of soldiers came into view marching in quickstep, reinforcing the position to the north of the bridge.

‘Different uniforms,’ said the commodore. ‘Look, caps, not shakos. The marshal has swallowed his pride and is bringing in another brigade to help crush the city.’

On their side of the lines an old steamman came into sight, supported by a couple of young political fighters from the party of the Levellers.

‘Guardian Tinfold,’ said the Carlist officer.

Tinfold made a weary whistle as steam escaped out from beneath his metal plates. ‘I told Hoggstone our forces were not prepared for an all-out assault. I counselled for a guerrilla campaign.’

Oliver pointed to the Quatershiftian soldiers blocking the north end of the bridge. ‘Time is their ally, old steamer, not ours. If we don’t free Middlesteel before the cursewall is lowered you’ll have your guerrilla war — generation after generation of fighting from caves in the uplands.’

‘Fastbloods are so hasty,’ sighed the politician. ‘Well then, we must save Jackals from the folly of our alacrity. Our people in the city are cut off now; we must open a passage to the pocket or suffer encirclement and defeat. Nagcross Bridge must fall.’