Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air

‘Someone like my chancellor, perhaps? When I need m’ledger balanced I’ll be sure and come over to the Treasury offices at Greenhall. Until then, sir, I will take counsel from where I see fit.’

Aldwych whipped his red rod across and tried to land a blow on the First Guardian’s face. Hoggstone ducked to the side and saw his own blow blocked by his challenger’s staff. Just as Hoggstone thought. Aldwych was precise and powerful, but predictable. A typical product of the House Horse Guards. No creativity, no art in his moves. The staff school of Bludgeon, Bludgeon and Trample.

Stamping to try and distract Hoggstone, Aldwych swung his red rod across, then reversed and swung again, repeating the movement in a fusillade of blows.

Too canny to trade windmills with the Guardian, Hoggstone deflected the blows side on — a flat fighting profile the inhabitants of the Middlesteel rookeries called eeling, after the cantankerous eels fished out of the Gambleflowers.

Aldwych was sweating, tiring. Red rod was far heavier than a training staff or a duelling rod. The ancient debating sticks came from an age when parliamentarians still wore mail armour under their gentleman’s cloaks. The young buck was slowing now, and Hoggstone feinted, then landed a jab on the Guardian’s knee.

Yelping with pain, Aldwych dropped down and Hoggstone crowned his skull with a smashing blow. The challenge was over. Aldwych lay sprawled unconscious on the debating sticks platform.

‘The issue has been decided in favour of the First Guardian,’ announced the speaker. ‘The proposal is now before the House. Those in favour?’

A sea of yellow flags was raised.

‘Those against?’

The opposition Guardians contested the proposition, waving their flags. Even lathered in sweat and still panting, Hoggstone could see that he had carried the day. No one in his party had dared oppose him after the Chancellor’s play for power had been beaten down, and the Purists still held the numbers after the last election.

‘The proposal is carried,’ announced the speaker, banging her gavel.

Hoggstone stared up at the press gallery, at the illustrators scribbling furiously away on their pads. He was not a gambling man, but if he had been, the First Guardian would have betted that Dock Street’s headlines tomorrow would describe how close he had come to being defeated by a rebellion in his own ranks.

A bit of roughhouse theatre for the pensmen, and the rising death toll from the docks would be safely buried away on the inside pages. But then the hacks did not want the truth. They wanted whatever sold their penny sheets.

Yes. Quite a satisfactory afternoon’s work.

Shifting from foot to foot, the red-coated soldiers were trying to keep warm as they waited on the icy moor. Jamie Wildrake looked at them with dissatisfaction. They were the scrapings of Jackals’ gutter. While every child — every gentleman — aspired to join the Royal Aerostatical Navy, protectors of the realm worshipped by the people, what was left for the regiments of the new pattern army? Occupation of towns left flattened by airship bombardments? Bad rations and the discipline of the strap? No wonder the doomsmen often had to offer criminals the choice of service in lieu of transportation, spilling the human debris of the jails into the Jackelian military.

But convicts were what the wolftaker needed this day, especially red-coated criminals who had been taken in by his false colonel’s papers when he had turned up at their poorly manned border garrison.

Wildrake could feel his muscles straining as he lifted one of the granite boulders from the soggy ground. The pressure on his arms was exquisite, each rise of the rock building him up, making his body harder and stronger, little footsteps on the infinite road to perfection. By contrast, the soldiers of the Twelfth Frontier Foot sat on their packsacks and smoked mumbleweed pipes, bodies soft and fleshy, clothed in layers of fat from too many days spent warming themselves by the fire in their hill fort. Watching the rain beat down on the moors while they chewed salted beef and swigged their daily ration of blackstrap. Sending patrols out to check the listening posts to make sure the shifties were not trying to dig surreptitious tunnels under the killing warp of their own cursewall.

Wildrake did not know how the soldiers could bear to exist with those loose rolls of flesh hanging around their bellies and off their arms. Where was their self-respect? Could they not feel the hum and tensions of their sinews calling out to be stressed and pained with exercise? Pain for the lats, pain for the pectorals, pain for the deltoids and hams. Glorious.

He chewed a fresh cud of shine and watched for the wagon coming from the south. It arrived within an hour of the time he had agreed with Tariq. The soldiers looked nervously at the white paint on the box-like caravan being pulled across the wet moorland by a train of six massive shire horses. Their fear intensified when they caught sight of the twin snakes of the surgeon’s guild on the side.

‘Colonel,’ coughed the company’s lieutenant. ‘That carriage is sporting a plague wagon’s livery.’

‘A small deception, lieutenant,’ said Wildrake. ‘To transport a delicate cargo.’

The driver of the wagon dropped down to the soil and grasped Wildrake’s arm in the Cassarabian style. ‘So my friend, does this prophet-cursed land of infidels ever get to see the sun?’

‘The Circle knows better than to waste its light on the head of a sand cur, Tariq.’

‘Ha, is that so?’ laughed the Cassarabian. ‘Well, your gold will sweeten the scent of my counting room all the same — perhaps it will pay for one of those ridiculous shades you use to keep out the rain. I will sit under it and take caffeel in one of your gardens and invite all my friends to my house to see how fine I am.’

‘With a bit of tweed and a decent tailor you can dress up a spaniel as a Jackelian gentleman,’ said Wildrake. ‘But it still barks.’

The Cassarabian went around to the back of the wagon and took a key to the padlock there, sliding out a chain and throwing open the door. ‘I do not need to bark, my friend. I have others to do that for me.’

Two creatures leapt out of the wagon, brown arcs of panther-sized muscle with flat muzzles and wide interlocking fangs, jaws like mill-saws clicking in greedy anticipation. The human eyes buried in their skull-plates flicked over the ranks of the soldiers and the troops fell back terrified.

‘Biologicks!’ said the lieutenant. ‘The church will not suffer their presence in Jackals.’

‘Hence the plague wagon,’ said Wildrake, as if he were explaining to a child. ‘A craftsman needs the right tools, lieutenant.’

‘Colonel, those creatures have been grown inside the wombs of slaves,’ insisted the officer. ‘They are abominations.’

The Cassarabian shook his head. ‘Alikar preserve me from the backward mind of the infidel. What else would you expect us to do with wombs blessed on women by the hundred prophets, bake bread in them?’

‘Their presence in Jackals is prohibited,’ shouted the officer.

‘The state makes the law,’ said Wildrake. ‘And parliament makes the exceptions to that law. We are both servants of that state, lieutenant. Besides, where would a hunt be without its dogs?’

‘Those things are not gun hounds,’ said the lieutenant. Both the creatures were flat on the ground, growling, sensing the hostility of the officer of light foot.

‘They are at least part dog,’ said Wildrake, smiling at the things. They stared back at the agent with their wide children’s eyes. ‘Or is it sand wolf, Tariq?’

‘Colonel, I will not allow my company to follow these unholy blendings, they stand against the Circlelaw,’ spat the lieutenant.