Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air

‘Are they expecting trouble?’ Molly asked.

‘War on two fronts,’ said Harsh. ‘The outlaws of Grimhope would love to back up the city’s shit, although the last time they managed that was back in King Jude’s reign. Then you’ve got the sewer scavengers and other misfits in the higher under-city and basement levels who seem to regard Middlesteel’s crap like it’s a precious resource that’s being stolen away from them.’

Their pocket aerostat was drifting towards the stone fortress.

‘Don’t know why they should be bothered,’ said Molly. ‘There’s always more shit in Middlesteel.’

Harsh passed Molly a line with a lead weight on the end. ‘My thoughts precisely. Cast this down when we’re about the same height as the buildings. Try not to brain anyone, kid.’

As they were hauled down by a team of engineers, Molly saw that the fortress inhabitants’ faces were all concealed by menacing brown gas masks, even the four-armed craynarbians’ — names stencilled above their visors alongside little silver stars of rank. Molly was about to leap from the basket when three engineers with large porcelain tanks of flammable vapours and iron-tipped hoses took position around the aerostat. A fourth engineer on a peck wheeled out a blood machine on a cart. The peck was impatiently scratching the floor, its bird-like feet shorn of all its toe claws.

Dismounting from the peck, the engineer stared at Molly through the visor of his gas mask. ‘This is the girl you came for?’

Professor Harsh vaulted the airship gondola. ‘Scrawny little thing, sergeant. No meat on those arms.’

‘No gold statues this time, then, professor?’

‘If you find a temple in the Duitzilopochtli Deeps that hasn’t been turned over a thousand times by grave robbers, outlaws and scavengers, you be sure and give me first refusal, sergeant.’

The professor pressed her thumb on the needle of the blood machine and waited for the small steam-driven transaction engine to confirm her identity.

‘You match your census record, Amelia,’ said the engineer officer. ‘And you can vouch for your companions?’

‘Didn’t leave the aerostat once,’ said the academic. ‘Didn’t even touch soil in the Deeps.’

Moving past the engineer, Molly dodged under the peck’s vicious beak and looked at the transaction engine on the blood machine. Something about the way its calculation drums were turning whispered to her that it would break down before the end of the month.

The engineer sergeant switched off the machine’s boiler. ‘There’s fey runners down here, girl. Shape switchers. Outlaw worldsingers who can put the glamour on your face too, mould your skin like putty. You can’t be too careful.’

Molly gave the engineer her best dumb female smile and when his back was turned, she pushed and clicked the out-of-calibration drum into its offsteam mode. Their maintenance staff would spot the wear on it now, when they came to check the blood machine.

Ver’fey called out to her and Molly saw that the pensman and the professor were entering the fortress; two lines of thick metal doors opening like interlocking dragon’s teeth. Inside, a private line on the atmospheric lifted them to the surface in a bare service capsule. The capsule was crowded with the Worshipful Company’s engineers, large soldiers with gas masks and unloaded pistols dangling from their belts, the stench of sewer pipes and peck sweat still clinging to them.

They emerged at the foot of the North Downs, low chalk hills that bordered the outskirts of Middlesteel and the Crystsoil Palace. Acres of glass domes and greenhouses covered the sewage treatment fields, masking the smell of the city’s swill from the wealthy homes and estates of north Middlesteel; villages until Jackals’ capital had devoured them in its spread outwards from the river.

Professor Harsh shook Nickleby’s hand; her massive arms making the writer’s seem like sticks in comparison. ‘I need to wait for them to crate up the stat and send it topside. I trust that The Illustrated is good for the finder’s fee we agreed?’

‘They’re paying me, aren’t they?’ said Nickleby. ‘You are still searching for the city then?’

‘Going to head out to the mountains in Airney,’ said the professor. ‘There’s a lashlite nest there where I heard the flying lizards have an old legend of a hunting party finding something in the sky. I need to look into it.’

‘The university won’t be pleased if they find out.’

‘That’s why it’s your money paying for the trip,’ said Harsh. She ruffled Molly’s hair and slapped Ver’fey’s sword arm. ‘It’s not too late to accept my offer, Ver’fey.’

‘I like the feel of Middlesteel’s cobbles under my feet too much to join your expedition, damson,’ said Ver’fey. ‘Besides, Mister Nickleby has already secured me a position on his newspaper.’

‘Copy runner?’ said Harsh. ‘Kid, that’s more dangerous than life with me. You’ll have runners from the Star, Journal and Post waiting on every corner from Dock Street to your print works to slap you down.’

Ver’fey tapped her shell armour with her sword arm. ‘There isn’t anyone who knows the lanes and passages like a Sun Gate girl.’

Molly nodded in agreement.

‘You change your mind about life in the smoke,’ said the professor, ‘you can find me through Saint Vine’s College.’

Nickleby led the two poorhouse girls through the maze of crystal-covered buildings and accordion pipes that made up Crystsoil Palace — most of the works given to processing expansion-engine gas from the slops and sewage before sending the torrent of waste spewing into the caverns below. The building seemed strangely majestic for the purpose of taking away the capital’s waste; white stone walls supported by temple-like columns and scattered openings, statues standing in alcoves.

‘Ver’fey, what city was the professor talking about?’ asked Molly.

‘Ancient Camlantis,’ said the craynarbian. ‘The professor thinks that it was destroyed in a floatquake and its ruins are still drifting through the sky somewhere.’

Molly laughed. ‘And how’s she going to get high enough to find out? Train a flock of flying pigs?’

‘There speaks the next chairman of the royal academy of science,’ said Nickleby.

The three of them gave way to a line of engineers with black sewage poles, then Nickleby pointed to a horseless carriage in the shadow of a building. It was one of the six-wheeled imports from the Catosian League, its high-tension clockwork mechanism far in advance of the crude Jackelian copies that could be seen clattering over the horse dung on Middlesteel’s avenues.

‘You can afford this?’ Molly eyed the pensman suspiciously. ‘Do you write for The Illustrated or do you own it?’

Nickleby smiled mysteriously. ‘I also write, Molly.’

Ver’fey and Molly fitted snugly in the red leather couch behind the driver’s seat, a retractable cover behind their heads in case rain fell on the open cab. The carriage started with a thrum and Molly could almost feel the tension of the interlocking springs under their seat. She remembered a cartoon — possibly from Nickleby’s own Illustrated — of the Guardian who had opposed the introduction of the horseless carriages; the politician being launched from a cloud of exploding clockwork towards the floor of parliament, with the words, ‘M’lords, regard my unsafe seat’ inked into the speech balloon. But it was mostly the cheap Jackelian imitations that exploded. Mostly.

Nickleby drove them through the handsome boulevards and past the stately houses and crescents of Haggswood. School had just finished and children in matching red and brown uniforms were walking home, some accompanied by nannies in austere black robes and prams just as dark.