Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air

A pile of burrowed dirt in front of her was the only clue that the events of the day had not been a dream. Once more the Hexmachina had returned to her lover’s embrace. The Wildcaotyl had faded away like an echo in a well. Down the hill a few torches moved around the dark plain — scavengers looking for boots and coins to strip from the corpses, soldiers calling out for comrades, wives and children calling for fathers who had not returned, a few medical company orderlies moving between the bodies, trying to locate the increasingly weak cries of the wounded.

The stars were in the east, partially covered by smoke still rising from Middlesteel. No glow of fire though — the water must have been restored and the fires put out. For the first time in her life Molly did not know what to do. She had felt the heat of familiar souls when she had been joined with the Hexmachina — the commodore and the fey boy, Coppertracks too. They might be back at Tock House now if the folly had not been smashed apart by the Commonshare’s aerial assault. She could join them. She could do … anything. Nobody was hunting her blood now, the poor house was gone — Circle, the very records of her existence might lie in a broken tran saction engine smouldering in the ruins of Greenhall for all she knew.

But she was a Middlesteel girl at heart; she headed in the direction of the moon, across the battlefield towards the capital.

Molly wandered through the downs of Rivermarsh like a wraith. After being joined with the Hexmachina everything seemed flat and dull, denied the sight beyond sight the ancient machine possessed. It was a surreal nightmare. The wailing of a wife who had just discovered her dead husband on the ground, his face sliced by a Commonshare sabre. The multi-armed steamman she found walking through a field of deacti vate knights and mounds of dead metal-fleshers, the water from his boiler leaking out as tears for the warriors he had commanded. She pressed on him the fused soul boards of Slowstack in return for a promise her friend would be taken back to the Free State. She doubted they would inter a desecration in their hall of the dead, but perhaps the board would be scrubbed and returned to a new body, as was their way. Circle knows, there would be enough parts to be returned to the mountain kingdom over the next few weeks, caravans of deactivate. Parts enough for a new generation of steammen to replace the fallen of the last.

She was trudging up a slope when she noticed a figure in a bath chair slowly pushing itself up the hill in front of her. The ground was damp and his wheels were grinding through the slippery mud.

Molly took the handles on the chair and helped persuade it to the top of the rise. ‘You want to be careful, old fellow. The steammen have pickets out here to stop mechomancers robbing their graves, they won’t care if you’re after a Commonshare sabre to sell at the market or a Free State voicebox.’

‘Thank you, compatriot, but I’m not with the crows,’ said the man. ‘I was looking for a friend of mine, an old student.’

‘Did you find him?’

‘What was left of him. He died during the battle. It helps to see the body sometimes, to remember the man.’

Molly pushed the chair around a collapsed exomount, a circle of dead Jackelians surrounding the beast, testament to the power of its pincers. ‘A lot of people died here today.’

‘Is that not the truth?’ He slowed the chair and they listened together to the cries of the dying and the wounded still out on the field. ‘What is it they say about Jackals? Every valley has a battle and every lake has a song. I wonder what they will say about this place in a hundred years?’

‘They’ll talk about the lions in the sky and the shifties dead in the snow. But you won’t have to wait a hundred years; there’ll be penny ballads on sale outside Rottonbow by the end of the week.’

‘You’re a true Jackelian,’ laughed the man. ‘You should write some of those ballads yourself and approach a printer; you would have the market to yourself if you got in early enough.’

‘You know, I think I might just do that,’ said Molly. ‘And are you going back to teaching?’

‘I have an invite,’ said the man. ‘From a Guardian called Tinfold, to run for parliament.’

Molly snorted. ‘That old whistler? He’s a radical — the Levellers haven’t held the majority for a hundred years.’

‘Do you think so? I always thought they were a bit middling. Still, I like to tilt for lost causes.’ He indicated one of the corpses Molly was pushing him past. ‘And after this I don’t think Jackals will be quite as complacent about our position in the natural order of things. Middlesteel will need rebuilding and the fleet will need rebuilding; most of the Special Guard are torcless and on the run; there’ll be calls to firebomb Quatershift to rubble that will need to be fought. Thousands of our people have been turned into metal-fleshers — they will need to be helped. I think a change might be just what we need. How about you? Are you old enough to hold the franchise?’

‘Greenhall took my blood code earlier this year,’ said Molly. ‘Maybe I’ll even vote for you, though I don’t know if I’d be doing you any favours if I did.’

‘I can still hold a debating stick.’ He slapped the side of his bath chair. ‘And I can strike low, where it hurts.’

‘To Middlesteel then?’

‘Yes,’ said Benjamin Carl. ‘Home.’

Harry pushed the dead Third Brigade officer off the chair. The rear guard had made a valiant stand at the little farmhouse north of Rivermarsh. But the vengeful survivors of parliament’s new pattern army pursing them had chewed them up.

‘Well, he wasn’t going to need it,’ said Harry, seeing Oliver’s look.

‘You had an offer for me, Harry.’

‘What makes you think that?’ asked the disreputable Stave.

‘The fact that you’re here. If I had to guess, I would say you’ve been talking to someone who knows their weapons. Or their history. Or both.’

Harry sighed. ‘Yes. It’s those two pistols, Oliver. They come with a provenance of trouble. That bloody preacher, I should have known he was up to no good.’

‘They’re part of the earth, Harry, part of the land.’

‘That’s strange, Oliver, because I was going to propose taking them up there.’ He pointed up to the ceiling.

‘With or without me?’

Harry winked. ‘Either will be acceptable.’

‘I don’t think I would make a good wolftaker, Harry.’

‘I don’t think the Court cares. That old preacher gave us the run-around, Oliver. Like no one else has ever done before. At the time I thought he was the man behind the trouble, but I was wrong. It’s not often I admit that.’

‘That’s what I mean. You’ve got a plan. You’re systemized. All that watching and peeping and planning, all those games, all those little intercessions, the small shuffles of pieces across the board, the feints and bluffs.’

‘Your father played the great game, Oliver.’

‘I am not my father.’

‘The Court doesn’t like free agents. It pollutes their ability to predict things, having chaotic elements running around down here freelancing.’

‘You’re right, Harry, these two pistols don’t have a plan or an agenda. But when you wear them you can see evil, see it like a colour, feel it like a physical force.’

‘We need the rule of law. Have you ever considered that those belt guns understand evil because they are evil? The things the preacher did when he was running around Jackals … he was operating without any boundaries. He was becoming what he hunted.’

‘You think because a king-killer wrote a charter on a piece of bloodstained note paper he stole from the palace and gave it to the Court of the Air that what you do is justice?’ said Oliver. ‘The Court recruited you from prison. Just like the Third Brigade recruited their soldiers. Does the Court want wolftakers, or does it want killers who will take orders?’