Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air

Tzlayloc’s devils halted in confusion. Behind the wounded monarch, stamping across the battlefield and making the ground tremble, came a wave of war bodies, each piloted by a child-like steamman. Following the war frames a wave of steammen knights charged to the aid of their collapsed monarch, Tzlayloc’s demon creatures leaping and crawling to meet the attack.

‘How many mu-bodies do you have, little toy?’ hissed Tzlayloc, looking down at the fallen monarch. ‘It does not matter. I shall rip them all apart and cast your melted slag into images of the Wildcaotyl for the temples of the people.’

‘You shall not triumph, Tzlayloc.’

‘Have you glimpsed the future, little toy?’ laughed Tzlayloc. ‘I shall set a new future for you and your people. For all of Jackals and the world beyond. Did the roll of the cogs in the filthy puddle of your own juices show you your death?’

‘They did,’ groaned King Steam.

Tzlayloc watched in amusement as the weakening Loas faltered around the royal war frame and glanced across at the advancing drone bodies. ‘Then I shall leave you to it. You may live just long enough to see the last of your army trodden into the mud.’

Inside the pilot cage King Steam’s golden hand fell limply off the control levers. He had to stay alive a little longer yet. There was something he had to wait for before he departed the field of battle, before he moved along the great pattern. Tzlayloc had to be kept distracted. He dare not shut down his pain receptors, in case the lack of sensation carried him away. His time here was ended, but he had to suffer the pain a little longer. Each second became an eternity of torture for the monarch.

To the rear of Tzlayloc, Marshal Arinze’s trumpeters sounded new orders. The disciplined lines of the Third Brigade closed into a defensive formation, the equalized outlaws of Grimhope that had been held in reserve at last marching down in columns to lend support. Arinze had fought the Free State both under the flag of the old regime and for the Commonshare — he knew what to expect, as did his soldiers. Canisters of harpoon-like barbs were unloaded from the ammunition train and rolled towards their artillery.

A riding officer galloped up to the marshal. ‘Gun-boxes, compatriot marshal. Advancing from the east.’

‘Ride to the battery,’ ordered Arinze. ‘Tell the artillery captains to concentrate their fire on those royal war bodies. Halt them before they get to our lines.’

After the artillery crews had resighted their cannons and fired the first ranging shots it would have taken an observant eye on a telescope to notice that the four war frames seemed surprisingly resilient to the barbs of their canister fire. Or that explosions on the downs to the east were mirroring the explosions around the giant steammen — exactly where they would be falling if they were passing unhindered through the war frames.

Captain Flare jumped onto the dying monarch’s chest, the steel plates flexing under the impact of his dense fey bones. Oliver was quick behind him, climbing up handholds in the metal. The Whisperer stayed in the lee of the broken war body, muttering with the effort of creating the living illusion of steammen war bodies, a slightly different angle of view needed for every bystander in Rivermarsh. A roar of fury behind them indicated that the mountain of flesh that was now Tzlayloc had finally discovered the trick that had been played on him.

Flare gazed across at the terrible creature. He did not see the Chairman of the First Committee, or Jacob Walwyn, or any threat to Jackals worthy of his guardsman’s oath, he did not even see the betrayer of his fey people’s hopes for freedom. He saw the monster that had strung up his son like a rabbit to be skinned and used as a lure. Flare leapt down from the wrecked war frame and met Tzlayloc’s charge — Oliver swore the ground shook as the Special Guardsman ran.

‘Oliver.’

The Whisperer was climbing up the war body, his shape flickering back and forth from bronzed warrior to his true form.

‘Oliver.’ It was not the Whisperer speaking — it was King Steam. The steamman looked in a bad way, the right side of his body crushed underneath the crumpled pilot guard, the left pierced by bone-sword strikes and scarred by acid trails.

‘Your Majesty, your knights are coming for you.’

‘The hardest part of being a monarch is knowing the time of your own death,’ said King Steam.

‘Your people can save you.’

The King had barely heard Oliver. ‘How else can a route for the new king be prepared?’

Oliver pulled at the frame but it was too badly mangled; removing it by violence would tear the steamman apart.

‘Stop trying to save me, young softbody,’ whispered King Steam. ‘Instead, save both our races. The Wildcaotyl feed on souls and the worship of their kind, on the very life of the earth. The souls are of Jackals and the Free State and the Wildcaotyl need the bones of the earth to drain them; when you move along the Circle you move through the bones of the earth. We are the songs of stardust, Oliver, and like all insects the Wildcaotyl are drawn to our flame. Snuff out the flame…’

Snuff out the flame!

Captain Flare was surrounded by a sea of Tzlayloc’s devils, more and more of them emerging from that deformed body. Flare smashed and crushed the creatures, so covered in blood and the insects’ perverted pulp that he looked like a crimson golem come out of the kiln. Broken Wildcaotyl littered the field, swarms of their brethren climbing the wall of corpses to hurl themselves at the Special Guardsman.

Captain Flare was just one man. Soon his fey flesh began to weaken. His rain of punches slowed as more and more of the Wildcaotyl impaled and scraped at his iron body with their claws.

Snuff out the flame .

Oliver extended his senses over the battlefield, reaching for the bones of the earth, but there was so much evil to ignore. Parliament’s forces were wavering as they clashed against the disciplined ranks of the Third Brigade, too few professional soldiers and too many amateur street fighters and Carlist rebels filling out their companies’ lists. The steammen knights were bogged down amidst the Wildcaotyl horde while ranks of metal-fleshers and First Brigade reinforcements pinned down any scattered Special Guardsmen who had not fled Rivermarsh for freedom. But underneath all the confusion the lattice of the earth’s leylines still throbbed, weak and thin after being drained and tapped by worldsingers on both sides.

Around Tzlayloc’s misshapen form the lines were distorted and diffuse, the power of the Wildcaotyl a weight on the surface of the world that she could barely support. Now Oliver saw it, the pain and horror of the battlefield being channelled through the bones of the world, the earth a sponge soaking up the blood and souls for the Wildcaotyl to sup on, each new morsel allowing more of them to uncoil through the cracks in the world. The essence of the Jackelians was being destroyed like coke thrown into a furnace, with the world the insects’ boiler, an engine to power their insane mission for calling down their unholy high gods.

‘Oliver,’ hissed the Whisperer. ‘Ware the enemy.’

At the foot of the fallen war frame a wave of Wildcaotyl demons were clambering up the steamman weapon, but Oliver did not hear the Whisperer’s warning — his attention was spreading out along the lattice of leylines, travelling along the bones of the world.

The Whisperer swore. These things were hard to fool, inhuman, their minds warped flesh that had been unnaturally multiplied from the hive of Tzlayloc’s body. Their dreams were cold alien things. He focused. With snarls of anger the creatures fell upon each other, seeing Special Guardsmen rather than their own foul forms, tearing into each other.