Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air

He looked at Oliver with a glimmer of recognition, his eyes widening when he noticed the Whisperer. In some way he saw straight through the feybreed’s illusion, his eyes as true as his demigod-like strength. ‘That is fey? Dear Circle, I have never seen a body so changed by the mist that wasn’t killed by it.’

‘You should have spent less time at the palace and visited the lower levels of Hawklam Asylum, pretty boy.’

Oliver touched his neck. ‘No more collars, captain. No more orders.’

‘You?’ said Flare, astonished. ‘There isn’t enough power in the world to remove the hex that binds.’

‘Not enough power in this one, perhaps. Yet here you stand, free — but free to do what?’

‘My son,’ said Flare. ‘I want my son.’

‘Son?’ said Oliver. ‘But you’re not married, man, the penny dreadfuls always made a big thing about what a marvellous bachelor you were!’

‘Oliver, you turnip — it’s Prince Alpheus,’ hissed the Whisperer. ‘That’s his son, flapping like a flag on a standard by Tzlayloc’s side.’

‘Only a few in the Special Guard know that!’

‘I am in your guard, pretty boy. You might say I am the night watch.’

‘We’ll ride with you,’ said Oliver. ‘It’s about time Tzlayloc stepped down from the First Committee.’

‘Three fey boys to save Jackals,’ sighed Flare. ‘We’re not much.’

‘I reckon we’ll do,’ said Oliver.

Tzlayloc and King Steam closed on the battlefield, the armies of the Third Brigade and parliament breaking around their feet as the two titans clashed. The Chairman of the First Committee of Jackals was half again as tall as King Steam’s war frame now. His body had become a mass of writhing flesh, creatures with compound eyes and bones as sharp as craynarbian sword arms sprouting from his muscles, leaping off to decapitate Jackelian soldiers and feast on the corpses of the dead scattered across the snow. The two leaders fought inside a surf of two opposing mists, the monarch of the Free State supported by his weakening Loas — as insubstantial as stack steam under the assault of the Wildcaotyl — clouds of dark droning wasps which swung around the steamman, exploding then reforming like schools of black fish. Where they swarmed over the soldiers fighting in the titans’ shadows the warriors collapsed clutching their ears, the whine of the Wildcaotyl staying in their brains, intensifying and warping until their eardrums exploded, parliamentarians smashing their heads against rocks and rolling in the snow, as if the ice could cool the pain of the unholy song.

A thing with four clawed feet, hardly a body at all, erupted from Tzlayloc’s shoulder and leapt across the gap between the chairman and King Steam. The Wildcaotyl manifestation locked onto the pilot frame and tried to drive a claw into the skull of the King’s golden child-form. King Steam dodged the claw, twisting left and right as the razor bone plunged past him. One of the King’s chest-mounted pressure repeaters managed to find the right angle and depressed its barrel, hurling the clawing beast off in a storm of pellets.

Slipping the grip of one of Tzlayloc’s tentacle limbs King Steam arced his sword arm around, severing the branch of thrashing flesh. The limb fell onto the snow, crushing a Third Brigade trooper and growing millipede-like legs of bone, then rushing towards the King’s leg and wrapping itself around the steel in a circle of maddened, slathering tissue. A locust head with rotating jaws forced itself out of the stump where Tzlayloc’s tentacle had been severed, looking around and hissing at the monarch.

‘This is my time,’ jeered Tzlayloc. ‘Your reign is over. I have no need for the whir and tick of iron toys, of clockwork slaves.’

King Steam backed away from Tzlayloc, a rotating lantern viewer in front of his pilot cage showing him multiple perspectives of the Chairman of Jackals. ‘And I have no need for your stillborn vision for the world. You have become a sickness, Tzlayloc. You have made yourself a cancer on the belly of the world and to save my people, I will cut you out.’

Tzlayloc menaced the war frame with his tentacles and tilted his head back to laugh, shiny dark things like beetles spilling from his mouth as he did so. ‘I will place your soul board on top of the stack of broken components I shall build of your people, little toy. Your race’s very existence offends me — you are nothing but a conjurer’s trick of crafty mathematics slipping through ore and crystal.’

King Steam shut down his olfactory senses as the heat and stench from Tzlayloc’s throat carried across on the wind. ‘You shall not hunt my kind again. Never!’

The Free State’s ruler pistoned to the side as Tzlayloc hurled a ball of pulp and snapping claws at him. Tzlayloc made an obscene gesture with the fronds that used to be a hand. ‘Rust has not yet addled your memory then, I see, king of the toys. After the mountains of Mechancia have been buried under the advancing glaciers, I shall enjoy watching your children cannibalizing each other for food again and scrabbling to avoid my cull.’

Warding off the chairman’s swinging arms with his shield, King Steam riddled the trunk-like flesh with a line of soft eruptions from his repeater shells. ‘Listen to me, Tzlayloc; listen to me with the softbody heart that is still buried somewhere in that monstrosity of a body you have grown. Your allies plan to freeze our realm with more than ice this time. They would breach the walls of the world and forever silence the dance of time and energy. Whatever philosophies you hold to, whatever dreams you have for Jackals, the Wildcaotyl do not plan to honour them. They will betray you! Your movement is nothing more to them than a host body to lay their eggs inside — they will consume you and make dust of your plans.’

‘LIAR!’ Tzlayloc’s body writhed as if it were on fire, every inch of his bulk pulsing and coming alive. The Chairman of Jackals lurched forward, trying to break through the royal war frame’s defences. ‘They lifted the Chimecans to supremacy for a thousand years, saved them from the coldtime. Without their succour the race of man would be extinct. How much longer will the Wildcaotyl support our flawless Commonshare where we live in perfect cooperation, a precise mirror of their selfless association? There will be no slave revolt this time, little toy, no clever machines hiding under the ice to pour poison and sedition into the minds of the people.’

King Steam said nothing, but let his sword speak for him, the four barrels around its hilt detonating and carrying cannon balls filled with chemical poison, toxins from the Hall of Architects, into Tzlayloc’s chest. Screaming creatures fell out of the craters where the balls had struck and two enraged tentacles coiled out of Tzlayloc, one seizing the King’s sword arm while the other smashed into his pilot frame and sent him reeling.

The King looked down in revulsion as the centipede-like limb wrapped around his ankle started burning its way through the leg of his war body, clouds of molten metal spitting out as the Wildcaotyl sweated an acid of appalling complexity. King Steam fired a manipulator arm like a trident, spearing the burning thing, but it was too late. His leg parted, the armour foot-tread left burning in the snow as the King’s body started to topple backwards.

In desperation the falling king pitched his shield like a discus at Tzlayloc, the energy bleed from the spikes of the rim tearing at Tzlayloc’s face as he swayed back. The shield sailed past and embedded itself in the high ground behind him, Tzlayloc exultant as he looked down at the fallen monarch. King Steam’s body-mounted weapons were emptying their ammunition drums at the swarm of Wildcaotyl flowing off Tzlayloc, but it was to no avail — the chairman howled a victory scream. Loas swirled down, forming a shield that started to crumple as the black arrows of the Wildcaotyl broke against it.