Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air

‘As the people will, sir. And for the Circle’s sake, put the gag back on the royal pup before you leave the House. I don’t want The Middlesteel Illustrated running a story on him being seen naked within parliament’s walls.’

Ver’fey tapped Molly with one of her manipulator limbs, the short one under her big bone-sword arm. ‘Molly, we’re being followed.’ The craynarbian had never seen a creeper or vine in Liongeli, but she still had her jungle senses.

‘From where?’

‘As we turned off Watercourse Avenue.’

Molly swore to herself. They had set watchers outside the poorhouse then. Damn her family. It was one thing to know from your earliest years you had never been wanted, cast out like the previous night’s garbage. It was quite another to have your own blood trying to tidy up loose ends by slitting your throat. ‘How many?’

‘Two men.’

Molly pondered their options. ‘If it is me they want and they’ve clocked me, their numbers won’t stay at two for long. The gang that did for Rachael and the house will be swarming over Sun Gate.’

Ver’fey gestured off the street with her bone-sword. ‘We could play alley-dodge, then slice them good.’

Molly shook her head. ‘You’re a game bird, Ver-Ver, but the two of us are no match for a crew of professional toppers. End of the street, you jump left for Shell Town, I’ll cut right and lose them in the Angel’s Crust.’

Ver’fey made a noise of disgust. Like all her kind, she would only be seen dead in a jinn house — quite literally. The only effects the pink-coloured drink had on craynarbians were to make them vomit and to slow their hearts to a dangerously low palpitation.

‘Luck to us,’ said Ver’fey.

‘You blooming well look after yourself, Ver-Ver,’ said Molly.

They got to the end of the street and Molly lunged right and up Shambles Lane, the sound of Ver’fey’s heavy, shell-covered body clattering the opposite way fading as she found the narrow corridors of the Pinchfield rookeries. The Angel’s Crust was up the Shambles and on the left, a three-storey temple to Middlesteel’s sinners; the low-rent equivalent of Fairborn and Jarndyce. Two floors of drunken loutish revelry with bedrooms on the third floor, where women with low necklines and even lower morals plied Middlesteel’s oldest trade.

As she sprinted for the bright yellow light of the place, Molly caught a glimpse of two shadows racing after her. Even as she cursed, part of her was glad they had left Ver’fey to escape; the craynarbian girl could move fast over a short distance, but her armour made her a poor bet for a marathon chase. This was confirmation. Someone wanted Molly dead. Very badly indeed.

Molly hurdled a clump of collapsed snoring drinkers and hurtled through the doorless entrance. She blundered into a drinker, spraying jinn over the sawdust on the floor.

‘Crushers,’ Molly yelled like a banshee. ‘Get out — it’s a raid. Ham Street bawdy.’

The ground floor erupted in confusion as chairs wrenched back and the surge for the exits started. If there was an honest man or woman drinking or conducting business in the Angel’s Crust, they were here by mistake. Like many of the girls at the Sun Gate workhouse, Molly had earned pennies in the evening moonlighting as a watch girl at the Angel.

A pistol charge rang out by the door and something pinged off one of the roof beams, followed by a swell of uproar and even more confusion. Her two pursuers were in the taproom and Molly dived low, riding and hiding in the panicked flow of the crowd. One of the barkeeps shoved past her clutching an old black blunderbuss. She went under the bar and darted through to the cellar, racing around walls of piled oak jinn barrels, each burned with the red marque of its Cassarabian exporter.

Thank the Circle. The old staff chute was still there, behind a tattered cloth curtain. Their backdoor if a rival flash mob decided to move in on the Angel. Molly was careful to leave the cloth in place as she shoved off down the short slide, landing in a puddle of grimy water and rotting bottle corks at the foot of the tumbledown rookeries beyond.

The maze of corridors changed all the time as the inhabitants added new doorways or closed off collapsed tenements. Little chance of them catching her now. She navigated the claustrophobic streets towards the back end of the Guardian Rathbone atmospheric. Molly smelt it before she saw it; two columns of large stacks pouring dark coal smoke into the sky, keeping the atmospheric’s tunnels in vacuum.

Guardian Rathbone station was a castle of white marble stained black with soot, arched domes of glass and girders crisscrossing the passenger concourse. It was thought to be one of the most magnificent stations on the atmospheric — rivalling Guardian Fairfax station out by the palace, perhaps even Guardian Kelvin station across from the House of Guardians. It would be dangerous now, though; too late for Molly to work the mob of Sun Gate clerks going home as camouflage; just a few revellers belatedly leaving the respectable cafes and salons along Goldhair Park.

Three steammen were cleaning the concourse, collecting rubbish and polishing the mosaic of the Battle of Clawfoot Moor, the scene of parliament’s final victory in the civil war. Molly had to get out of here fast. The atmospheric was too obvious an escape route. She checked her money. A penny short of the cheapest journey on the atmospheric. Damn. If she had realized earlier she could have dipped someone’s wallet back at the Angel’s Crust.

At the end of the station two figures in dark jackets walked onto the concourse. Molly danced into the shadow cast by one of the steammen, an iron skip on short stubby legs. No chance now to vault the ticket rail and make a dash for the underground platforms — the two bruisers would clock her. Of course, they might be innocent, watchmen for one of the Sun Gate towers. Sneaking a peek over the iron box, Molly saw they had split up and were drifting through the sparse queue of passengers, sweeping the hall in a precise pattern. Not so innocent, then.

She went over the side of the iron skip, sliding into sacks of litter. The head of the steamman swivelled around to regard her. ‘Ho, little softbody. What are you doing in my collection of gewgaws?’

‘Quietly with your speaking tube,’ Molly pleaded. ‘Two men are searching for me. They mean me harm.’

An iron eye-cover blinked over the steamman’s vision glass in surprise. ‘Harm, you say? That will not do.’

‘They’ll do for me, unless you quiet down.’

The volume of the steamman’s voicebox dropped to a whisper. ‘I believe you are known to me, little softbody.’

‘Not in this life,’ said Molly. ‘There weren’t any steammen in the Sun Gate poorhouse.’

The steamman had started moving its eight stubby legs, a wheel at its front directing them, jiggling her across the public space. ‘The people of the metal do not abandon our brothers to the workhouse, that is not the way of our kind.’

‘I need to get to the undercity. Can you take me down into the atmospheric?’

‘There is a high level of physical danger in the undercity,’ said the steamman. ‘The rules of community are not adhered to below.’

‘I know it’s an outlaw society,’ hissed Molly. ‘But I haven’t got anywhere else to run to.’

‘Crawl under my sacks,’ commanded the steamman. ‘Your pursuers draw close.’

Molly buried herself under the bags of waste, leaving as small a space to breathe as she dared. She heard a gruff voice asking a passenger if he had seen a missing runaway girl. The thug omitted to mention what Molly was running away from. Then the voice was left behind and the tap, tap, tap of the steamman’s legs on the concourse became the only sound she could hear.