Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air

Molly shook her head and knelt down beside Rachael’s body. ‘She was always the sensible one, our Rachael. Settle down to a nice safe job. Keep your nose clean. Don’t answer back.’

Ver’fey tried to pull Molly away. ‘You’re right, we should go now.’

‘Look where it got her, Ver-Ver. Bloody dead in this rotting dung heap of a home.’

‘Please, Molly.’

Molly picked up a candle and threw it into a pile of penny dreadfuls, the cheap paper catching light immediately. Flames jumped across the hemp blankets, crackling like a roasting pig.

‘A warrior’s pyre, for you, Rachael, and when I find the filthy glocker scum that did this to you — to us — I’ll burn them too and everything they hold dear. I swear it.’

Ver’fey trembled nervously on her feet. ‘Molly! Oh Molly, what have you done?’

‘Let it burn,’ said Molly, suddenly weary. She led Ver’fey back out of the dormitory before the flames took the rickety wooden stairs. ‘Let it all burn to the bloody ground.’

First Guardian Hoggstone tapped his shoe impatiently against the large porcelain vase standing by his writing desk, scenes of triumph from the civil war rendered delicately in obsidian blue. The weekly meeting with King Julius was a tiresome formality, little more than a cover for the chance to be updated by the commander of the Special Guard. Still, parliament held to its ancient forms. Two worldsingers stood silently flanking the door to the First Guardian’s office. Hoggstone smiled to himself. The Special Guard watched the King. The worldsingers watched the Special Guard. He watched the worldsingers. And who watched the First Guardian? Why, the electorate of course. That anonymous amorphous herd; that howling mob in waiting. Captain Flare came into the room. Without the King, but with the pup, Crown Prince Alpheus, in tow instead.

‘Julius?’ asked Hoggstone in a sharp voice.

‘Waterman’s sickness again,’ answered the captain. ‘He won’t be leaving the palace for at least a week.’

Hoggstone sighed and looked at the pup. It always made him nervous, seeing an almost crowned monarch with his arms still attached to his body.

‘Why, sir, is the boy not wearing his face mask?’

‘Asthma,’ said Captain Flare. ‘In the heat he chokes sometimes.’

‘I hate the mask,’ complained the prince. ‘The iron rubs my ears until they bleed.’

Hoggstone sighed again. ‘We’ll find you some royal whore, pup, for you to breed us the next king on. Then I’ll try and convince the house not to teach it to talk. Waste of bloody time having you able to say anything except parrot the vows of affirmation once a week.’

‘I hate you!’

Hoggstone rose up and drove a ham-sized fist into the prince’s stomach. The boy doubled up on the floor and the First Guardian kicked him in the head. ‘As it should be, Your Highness. Now shut up, or we’ll take your arms off early, cover them in gold plate and show them next to your father’s down in the People’s Hall.’

Flare lifted the gagging, gasping boy up and put him down on a chair. ‘Was that necessary, First Guardian?’

‘It was to me,’ said Hoggstone. The shepherd, that’s what they called Captain Flare behind his back. That’s what he had been, a herd boy, when a feymist had risen on the moors, turning Flare into a feybreed, giving him the kind of physical strength that demigods from classical history only dreamt about. But the man was soft, a useful fool protecting his new flock. The people. Yes. Everything for the people.

‘We’re not as modern as the Commonshare, sir,’ said Hoggstone. ‘Running all our nobles through a Gideon’s Collar. We still have to rely on a bit of shoe leather and a stout Jackelian foot every now and then.’

‘It’s putting the Jackelian boot in that you want to talk about?’ asked Flare. ‘The Carlists?’

‘I don’t even know if we can call the people we’re facing Carlists any more,’ said Hoggstone. ‘The local mob seems to have moved beyond the normal communityist platitudes our compatriots in Quatershift have been mouthing of late.’

‘You suspect something?’

‘There’s trouble being stirred in the streets. Too much and too widely spread for it to be anything other than organized.’

‘That’s what the House of Guardians’ Executive Investigations Arm is for,’ said Flare.

‘The g-men have been cracking the usual skulls, netting the usual suspects. Whatever’s happening out there on the streets, the old-time Carlists are as afraid of it as we are. Their leaders have been disappearing, at least, all the ones who have been opposing the new generation of rabble-rousers. The river police have been pulling the corpses of Carlist committeemen out of the Gambleflowers for a year now.’

‘You have a target in mind for the Special Guard?’

Hoggstone sounded frustrated. ‘This isn’t a Cassarabian bandit sheikh or a royalist pirate flotilla you can smash for the state — this needs subtlety.’

‘I can rip plate metal apart with my bare hands,’ Flare pointed out. ‘Rifle charges bounce off me and my skin can blunt a fencing foil. I am not sure the Special Guard can do subtlety.’

‘But there are others who can,’ said Hoggstone.

Flare’s eyes narrowed. ‘You are talking of the fey in Hawklam Asylum.’

One of the worldsingers flanking the door moved forward. ‘First Guardian!’

‘Stand back.’ Hoggstone’s voice was raised. ‘Damn your eyes, I do know how the order feel about the things we have contained in Hawklam.’

‘They are there for a reason,’ said the worldsinger. ‘The abominations they have endured have twisted the creatures’ minds far more than their bodies. Those things have as much left in common with beings such as ourselves as we do with an infestation of loft-rot beetles, and, given the chance, they would treat us much the same.’

‘It is their minds which interest me. We do not need many — just a couple with the talent to root out the core of the enemy in our midst.’

‘Soul-sniffers,’ gasped the worldsinger. ‘You believe the order would release soul-sniffers into the world.’

‘The people would not like it,’ advised Flare.

‘I am the people, sir!’ Hoggstone roared. ‘The voice of the

people, for the people. And I will not let the people fall under the spell of a horde of communityist rabble-rousers. I will not have the talent and prosperity of this nation run through a Gideon’s Collar like so much mince through a sausage grinder. I will not!’ Hoggstone slammed his writing desk and thrust a finger towards Captain Flare. ‘You think that if the people see the misshapen human wreckage in Hawklam Asylum the mob might stop worshipping the ground the Guard walk on. Start associating your guardsmen with feybreed abominations rather than the latest damn issue of The Middlesteel Illustrated with a stonecutting of your face grinning on the cover.’

‘It is possible,’ Flare acknowledged.

‘The art of leadership is knowing when the mob’s applause has become a self-destructive echo,’ said Hoggstone. ‘If the choice is the veil being pulled off your perfect persona or the state collapsing into anarchy and mayhem, I’ll choose the former over the latter. But do not worry, we shall keep the feybreed on a short leash and run them only at night. After all, it does not do to scare the voters.’

‘We will need to fashion special torc suits for them,’ said the worldsinger. ‘And organize teams to make sure the abomi nations don’t slip them.’

Hoggstone gestured wearily. ‘Do it, then. We need to know who is behind the unrest and when they intend to act, when they intend to take advantage of their mischief.’

‘As you will.’