Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air

‘Slowstack!’ Molly was caught off guard as the Whineside Strangler threw himself at her golden nimbus, his black field blending in a dance of colours, clawed fingers piercing and trying to penetrate the golden energy swirling around her form.

‘The things I am going to do you,’ snarled the strangler, his words mangled by the fact his tongue had split into two bony mandibles, the smell of burning meat from his throat making Molly want to gag.

She bunched up the energy within her body, collecting it in a golden coil inside her as she rolled with the strangler on the floor.

‘Help me,’ shouted the strangler back to his partner. ‘Help me hold her legs down.’

His compatriot left Slowstack’s body and drifted over on eight black lances of energy, a spider’s crawl. Molly detonated the charge that had been building inside her. The strangler was blown off her body and thrown down into the pit of the Chimecan death instrument. He rolled down into the body of the thing, blood-red crystals raining onto him as he collided with the instrument.

Detecting the energy of the Wildcaotyl entity, the weapon started to hum, a bone-grinding noise that made the walls of the chamber shake, showers of masonry falling from the ceiling. It was a song the earth had not heard for a thousand years, the music of insects, dreadful shortened notes that surfaced as if they were dying. Molly could see the glow from the machine where it was missing components, where the Chimecans had run out of beloved family members to sacrifice to complete the monstrous thing.

Molly did not need Slowstack’s faintly exclaimed warning; she turned and twisted the tendrils of black throbbing energy from the second convict, using them like the reins on a horse to toss the killer after his friend. Inside the pit the two convicts’ Wildcaotyl masters tempered the violence of their possession, fearful of damaging the instrument that when completed could summon their meta-gods.

She had no such compulsion. Watching the convicts floating and clawing their way up towards her, she reached inside the death instrument — its workings as cold and alien as the dreams of a locust. But even a device to crack the walls of reality had to be bound by the processes of this universe, the laws of mechanics. Her blood boiled inside her as she formed patterns, rolling through thousands of combinations of the hex-like keys that would unlock the weapon. She adjusted the pattern with each minor success, getting closer and closer to its activation cycle. The two killers were almost at the pit rim, their eyes dark and infinite, the human beasts within their hearts tempered now by the Wildcaotyl. They knew what she was trying to do — realigning the instrument, re-engineering the delicate forces within it. The wasps would protect the nest. Don’t look at them, focus on the task . She had a tune of her own to play.

The two killers cleared the rim and raised their hands to unleash a hell-storm at her, but she changed the pitch of the instrument, tuned the vibration to the Wildcaotyl riding these executioners. Behind them unearthly notes throbbed in the Chimecan device and the sheath of ebony energy that surrounded the killers was suddenly as insubstantial as meadow mist, wisps of force sucked towards the instrument. The Wildcaotyl spirits had consumed their host bodies. Without the black force feeding their muscles and reinforcing their frames the two convicts convulsed and fitted, the pain of the immortals’ withdrawal overwhelming.

Molly repeated the tune, watching the disruption of the apparitions with grim satisfaction. ‘You want to meet your gods, you filthy cockroaches? Tell the evil sods that Molly Templar says hello when you see them.’

The Chimecan engine vibrated wildly in its holding arm, the cloud of Wildcaotyl drawn into the blood-made mechan ism. It changed its ethereal pitch and finished with an almost human sigh. By the rim of the pit the two convicts lay sprawled, their bones turned to dust inside their skin, streaked black where the Wildcaotyl had burned them out. The Whineside Strangler would circle his fingers around the necks of no more victims in Middlesteel.

A warm breeze blew into the chilly chamber from the open door and Molly ran over to Slowstack, heaving his iron frame back onto his tracks. ‘Slowstack, can you hear me?’

‘We can,’ whispered his voicebox, the grill caved in and crumpled by the force of the convict’s attack. ‘We heard the song you played too. It was hideous.’

‘The Wildcaotyl thought so,’ said Molly. She looked around for anything she might use as a tool to work on the damage. There was nothing. She was stuck in the centre of the earth with the greatest engine of destruction the corrupt heart of the race of man had ever created, with not even a hammer to hand. ‘Stay with me, Slowstack. Don’t leave me down here in these halls alone. Please, not again.’

‘It is time for us to walk a different hall,’ said the steamman. ‘Our thread on the great pattern is coming to an end.’

Molly clasped the iron manipulator fingers of her friend. ‘I won’t watch you die again.’

‘We have been deactivate twice before, Molly softbody. It is easy. It is living as part of the great pattern that is hard. Do not mourn for us overlong.’

‘I am afraid, Slowcogs, Silver Onestack.’

‘Do not be afraid for us, young fastblood. We do not fear the darkness before we are made activate, why should we fear what may come after? We are notes in a song. The notes are played out and the song of the great pattern goes on forever.’

A pool of water was forming where Slowstack’s boiler was leaking and the light of his vision plate was fading. Molly was not sure how long she sat by his metal shell, empty of life now, before she felt the heat behind her. A white sphere hovered above the ground, the size of a bathysphere, a single silver eye sitting on its top. The face of a child appeared on the featureless white metal, like a real-box picture projected through a magic lantern.

‘Can you not save him again?’ Molly asked the Hexmachina.

‹Where there is life and will, I can show the way for the life metal. But he has passed beyond my reach. Slowstack is in the hymns of the people and the toss of the Gear-gi-ju cogs now.›

Molly wept, adding her tears to the pool of water from Slowstack’s boiler.

‹There are two soul boards inside his chest cavity fused together as one. Break them out, Molly Templar. Slowstack would wish them returned to the halls of Mechancia.›

She did as she was bid, the crystal boards as light as air. Had they weighed more when he was alive?

‹Stand in front of me now, child of Vindex. There is work to be done.›

Radiant with a golden luminosity, Molly stepped forward, two rivers of light flowing away from her chest, the beams joining together in a helix that slowly rotated between herself and the Hexmachina. From the sphere a similar golden beam extended out and encircled the helix, joining with it, twisting in joy before retreating back inside the Hexmachina.

‹Operator, you are recognized.›

Flowing back like quicksilver the front of the sphere formed an opening, a dazzling white space inside moulded like a handmade glove for Molly.

‘The enemy is powerful,’ said Molly, hesitating. ‘And there were seven of us before. Seven operators, seven Hexmachina.’

‹That is so,› said the Hexmachina. ‹But the Wildcaotyl have not changed in a thousand years, Molly. They believe they are so perfect that they would freeze us alongside themselves for cold eternity in amber. But we are capable of change, you and I, and the enemy fear that most of all. I have spent a millennium listening to the secrets of the earth whispered to me by my lover. Growing stronger, cleverer and wiser. And you, Molly, you are remarkable. Perhaps one Hexmachina and one operator will be enough this time.›