Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air

Oblivious to the carnage being inflicted at the foot of the King’s war body, Oliver started to realign the leylines around him, reforming and re-knitting the strength of the land, drawing the power into himself, a trickle at first — then a stream, then a torrent. Worldsingers on both sides of the battlefield fainted as the source of their wizardry disappeared, their hexes and spells falling apart even as they called them. There seemed an endless reservoir inside Oliver now, a well without an end to soak away the earth’s power. At the edge of the battlefield he could feel the Shadow Bear’s rage simmering at the intervention. Legitimate though, thought Oliver. The poor little fey boy was making good.

Below, the Wildcaotyl fighting each other were weakening, their mosquito barb into the repast of Jackals blocked. Tzlayloc realized the source of the threat as the shapes breeding inside his skin dried up, cracking and halting in stillbirth. Roaring he turned, wading through steammen knights and his own Wildcaotyl children without care, the mass of his horde heeding his call and breaking away from the steammen, flooding towards the fallen monarch’s shell. Captain Flare’s body lay in the snow behind them, his clothes ripped to pieces, his muscles scarred and purple. The Captain of the Guard was no more.

Above Rivermarsh the snow clouds had partially cleared, revealing a blue sky filled with drifting aerostats, their control lines cut and helpless before the whims of wind and weather. The Wildcaotyl were losing their ability to reshape the land now, to impose the cold perfection of the hive on Jackals. The false shadows of the steammen war frames flickered out of existence as the Whisperer turned his attention towards the wave of creatures heading towards him. Wildcaotyl stumbled and scrambled as they felt themselves plunged back into the icy angleless realm they had been exiled to, but there were too many for the feybreed’s illusion to hold.

Beneath his boots Oliver felt the King’s war body tremble. Had his interference with the earth’s power caused a floatquake? Surely not. What he was doing was only a variation of what the worldsingers did, tempering the earth’s passion to control the land that could be pushed towards the heavens on her temper. Earth fountained up in front of Tzlayloc, a geyser of molten worldstuff rising as tall as the chairman of the First Committee and showering burning rocks across the Wildcaotyl. The shambling mountain of flesh that had been Jacob Walwyn fell back, the spray flaming across the children of Xam-ku that had been birthed out of his tissue.

Something else was coming, surfing a wave of the earth’s fury. Oliver felt the bones of the world vibrate, his reformed lattice swept away as a tsunami of earthflow poured out of the hole, sweeping him aside, shattering against the feeding Wildcaotyl. Leylines reformed around the battlefield, impossible complex shapes, swirling around a white sphere hovering before Tzlayloc.

‘Sweet Circle,’ hissed the Whisperer.

Oliver felt a burning on his hip. His two belt pistols were glowing, pulsing to the rhythm of the sphere. ‘The Hexmachina.’

‘Not that. Its twice-jiggered friends !’ said the Whisperer, pointing up towards a cloud of dark spheres plummeting towards them from the firmament. Aerospheres, a rain of aerospheres. The Court of the Air had emerged out of myth; the wolftakers were protecting their flock at last.

Oliver drew his witch-blade as the first wave of Wildcaotyl demons mounted the King’s war body, eager to devour the feybreed who had interrupted their feeding. The Wildcaotyl had been driven into apoplexy by the appearance of the Hexmachina, and now they were boiling towards Oliver and his fey companion.

‘It’s time for Judgement,’ said Oliver.

United with the Hexmachina, Molly Templar felt the battle joined across a myriad levels, the Wildcaotyl immediately trying to subvert her modification of the leylines. They had already been weakened, the enemy starved. She recognized the presence of the strange fey boy from Tzlayloc’s cells. The unnatural barrenness of the earth around them was his doing. He had put a choke hold on the enemy’s windpipe, she could feel the souls of the dead moving uncertainly through the bones of the earth, and with a push of her will she created a puncture for them to escape to where they belonged.

Ignoring the pain of the other operator still burning across the Hexmachina, she pushed back the Wildcaotyl attacks, as if severing the strands of a spider’s web one by one. Memories of the previous conflict between the Wildcaotyl and the seven Hexmachina kept on passing through Molly’s mind, the other operators — the other races — the grasper, the craynarbian, the lashlite, the — she pushed them out, leaving just the memory of Vindex to advise her.

Xam-ku, most powerful deity of the Wildcaotyl pantheon, wrapped itself around her, trying to burn through the Hexmachina’s shields. So, it was still fighting the last war. A millennium of exile had taught the Wildcaotyl nothing. That was their weakness. The perfect order of the hive craved stasis. All end to the bubbling chaotic growth of the tree of life, the world remade in amber in their image.

‹I have learnt,› whispered the Hexmachina. ‹A thousand years of lessons from my lover, a thousand years of progression. Let me show you.›

Molly learnt too. She changed the set of the bones of the world, changed it again and again. Faster and faster. The Wildcaotyl howled as she transformed the great pattern faster than they could adapt to it. Pushing them a little further back into the abyss they had crawled from with each shift.

The thing that did not belong, the dark angel on the corner of Rivermarsh, bayed across inhuman frequencies as it saw its opportunity for total war disappearing before its senses. She — or was it the Hexmachina? — felt a twinge of sympathy for the Shadow Bear. It was intended for only one thing, and what was the point of a bomb that could not explode?

Now the Wildcaotyl strained for their life in this realm — feeling the cold depths of the angleless realm open up behind them — an eternity of hunger, an eternity of waiting, dreaming of nourishment. They flailed desperately, trying to find the souls in the bones of the world, trying to find the life of the land, but the ground around them was barren — it was the young feybreed from the cells, stealing their energy out from underneath their perverted weight on the world.

‹The sword,› whispered Molly.

Oliver ducked underneath the wavering tentacles of one of Tzlayloc’s demons, slicing out with his witch-blade. ‘The shield.’

Weighted cable lines whirled down between Oliver and the Whisperer, three soldiers riding the lines from their aerosphere towards King Steam’s war body.

Nathaniel’s body had changed; he wore the illusion of the incrementals landing around them, a black leather cape and menacing rubber tubes hanging at either side of his hood. Now the Whisperer looked identical to the Court of the Air’s fighting order, but he had plucked an officer’s insignia from their minds for his chest. The soldiers opened fire as they landed, steel boilers strapped on their backs hissing steam as they drew power for their odd-looking guns: thin metal lances connected to rubber belts implanted with crystal shells. No suicide guns these, they fired like a thousand windows being shattered simultaneously, as the shells were pulled through their lances.

They fanned out, firing down into the horde of Wildcaotyl devils trying to scramble up the corpse of King Steam, clouds of rotten flesh and demon-grown blood showering the snow and the side of the collapsed steamman war frame.

In front of them Tzlayloc’s flesh had hived off into a swarm of dark insects, attempting to enclose the golden halo of the Hexmachina, but the Wildcaotyl had entered Jackals too early and the seething mass was tiring, slowing, blinking out of existence as they expended the unholy energy they needed to survive. Jacob Walwyn was growing smaller and smaller, collapsing back into his man-shape as rolls of his giant’s flesh peeled off and cavorted in agony around him, being pushed and assailed from all sides: drained by their fey assailant, impaled on the steammen knights’ battle arms, shot to pieces by the black-clad soldiers landing in their midst. Behind the Wildcaotyl the disciplined lines of the Third Brigade were disintegrating as the aerospheres of the Court hovered over the battlefield, emptying fin-bombs into the shiftie ranks.