Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air

Holding the steering wheel between his legs, Nickleby tugged a mumbleweed pipe out of his coat pocket. He opened the door of his cab and banged the pipe on the road’s cobbles to empty it. He then proceeded to refill the pipe with grey Concorzian leaves. The pensman lit his pipe as he weaved their horseless carriage between a hansom cab and a milk cart doing its afternoon rounds — the plodding shire horse made skittish by the carriage’s thrum as it was overtaken. Molly winced. They must have been pelting along at nearly twenty miles an hour and Nickleby was steering the contraption with his knees!

Very’fey leaned over and whispered, ‘He’s always doing that.’

The tree-lined streets began to narrow and the residential crescents and their faux-marble facades gave way to Middlesteel proper. At one point, Molly thought she saw smoke rising from the east, wisps of black oily haze between the towering pneumatics of Sun Gate, gulls sweeping up on the thermals.

Her suspicions were confirmed when they came up to a wooden pole suspended across the road from a couple of barriers. Three crushers — two constables and a brigadier — nodded politely. Anyone riding an import from the city-states would warrant extra civility.

‘Brigadier,’ said Nickleby. ‘Has there been an incident along the road?’

‘In a manner of speaking, sir. The dockers’ combination has been rioting. Four other combinations have come out in support and now there’s trouble outside the palace as well as the House of Guardians.’ The policeman pointed up the road. A column of craynarbians was trotting down the street three abreast, their thorax shells painted in black. They carried round metal shields, the yellow hedgehog arms of the national police painted in the centre.

Ver’fey stood up and waved. ‘The Echo Street Heavy Brigade.’

Molly stared up — the street was briefly eclipsed by the dark shadow of an aerostat. She read the name on the side, the RAN Resolute .

‘Dear Circle!’ Nickleby sounded astonished. ‘Parliament’s not sitting — who’s ordered in the navy?’

One of the constables gazed up perplexed. ‘Ham Yard’s been in contact with the First Guardian, sir. We received instructions from his country residence through the crystal-grid to bring up army units from Fort Holloden in case they were needed.’

‘But Hoggstone wouldn’t order in the navy in an election year,’ said Nickleby. ‘The Purists would be massacred at the polls by the Roarers and Heartlanders.’

Doors were opening along the belly of the massive airship, and metal cages filled with gleaming glass fin-bombs were lowered into view.

‘They’re clearing for action,’ whispered the constable. He obviously could not believe what he was seeing.

‘We’ve never bombed Middlesteel,’ said Nickleby. ‘Not even during the worst days of the Carlist uprising.’

Everyone in the street had stopped to stare up at the disappearing bulk of the airship. She was heading east, towards the river and the docks.

‘Red tips,’ said Nickleby.

Molly looked at the writer. Tears were welling in his eyes.

‘Red tips?’

‘Red tips for firebombs, Molly. Green for dirt-gas. Blue for explosive and shrapnel. I was called up into the navy information section during the Two-Year War. I was there when we flattened Norlay and the Commonshare’s other mill towns. I never thought I’d see this again. And never at home.’

A collective gasp rose up from the Middlesteelians in the street as rumbles of man-made thunder echoed in the distance, the ground trembling. The two girls and the pensman held tight as their six-wheeled carriage shuddered. The sound died. A hush fell over the city. Down the street, the disciplined legion of craynarbian crushers still trotted in formation; they had not even broken a step. Molly doubted they would be needed now when they got to the scene of the disturbance.

Nickleby backed the horseless carriage up and headed down a side street.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Molly.

‘Where else when news happens, Molly?’ said the pensman. ‘We’re off to Dock Street.’

Pistols drawn, the first mate and the captain of the red-coated marines on the RAN Resolute faced down their bomb-bay crew.

‘Back to your posts, damn you,’ shouted the first mate.

‘They weren’t revolutionaries,’ said a sailor. ‘I didn’t even see anyone down there with a pitchfork, let alone a rifle.’

More jack cloudies were crowding up the passage from the lower deck, trying to push past the two officers.

‘The skipper had orders,’ said the first mate. ‘From the House and the Board of the Admiralty.’

‘You seen ’em?’ yelled a sailor.

‘Let’s have the orders in writing, then,’ demanded another.

‘Don’t you play the barrack-room lawyer with me, Pemberton,’ barked the captain of marines. ‘The first one of you jacks that crosses this line is a dead man.’

A sailor waved a wicked-looking fin-bomb loading hook. ‘You’ve only got two pistols, that’s enough for two of us.’

‘Enough for you, lad,’ warned the first mate.

The captain of marines glanced back at one of the nervous redcoats holding the corridor. ‘Get the airmaster down here, now!’

Captain Dorian Kemp, airmaster of the Royal Aerostatical Navy vessel Resolute lay next to the pistol he had just used to take his own life, what was left of his brains cooling in the wind blowing through an open hatch.

A dwarf with two heads did a little jig near the fallen officer. One of the heads was full-size, the other a shrunken, puppet-like growth. ‘Reached into his mind and pop. Reached into his mind and bang.’

His companion looked with pity at the feeble-minded fey creature dancing around the corpse. There but for the path of the Circle went half the Special Guard. ‘You’ve done a fine job, brother. The bombing run’s finished. Time to be away.’

‘All I had to practise with in my cells was the rats,’ giggled the two-headed figure. ‘I made them stand up and dance for me. Fighting in battles, my brave rats lining up and attacking each other with stones. Hold the line. Hold the line.’

‘No more games with rats, brother. You can make the hamblins do anything now,’ said the man, his skin starting to shimmer with witch-light. ‘Possess anyone you like.’

‘You won’t throw me back in my cell, will you?’ pleaded the dwarf.

‘Of course not,’ lied his companion, scooping up the small fey thing. Not until the wild bunch’s real job was done at least. There were standards to maintain, after all.

With a spurt of energy the man and his minuscule passenger accelerated out of the airship, contemptuously kicking the hatch shut, before vanishing into the sooty clouds floating up from the ground.

Middlesteel’s docks were a single wall of flame, the fires of the rioting mob burning out of control, now the dark brooding shape floating above them had spilled her deadly cargo.

The twenty-fourth floor of The Middlesteel Illustrated News was a riot of staff running past writing desks. The clatter of iron typewriters — hulking machines that translated the fusillade of words onto transaction engine punch cards — a background to the shouts and din across the open floor, drowning out what Nickleby was trying to say to Molly.

‘Need a comment from the Admiralty Board.’

‘Bodies are coming in to the Circle of Targate hospital, survivors too.’

‘There is no comment.’

‘Printers say they want extra money.’

‘Send someone around to the First Skylord’s residence. Doorstep him.’

‘Pay it.’

‘Interviews. Now.’

Through the confusion and hustle a crow-like figure on two crutches swung his corpulent bulk like an obscene pendulum — eyes bright and malicious, surveying the mayhem. It was him — no doubt about it, the editor and proprietor of The Illustrated . Molly remembered a cartoon of Gabriel Broad shortly after his legs had been broken by the flash mob — pointing a crutch accusingly across the magistrate’s court. ‘The truth needs no crutch,’ scratched next to his mouth in a speech balloon.