Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air

‘Sunk by age,’ whispered Nickleby to Molly. ‘It leaked most of the trip. We were lucky we didn’t end up roasting like beef on a spit underneath the Fire Sea.’

‘Ah, Molly,’ said the commodore. ‘You are welcome to the hospitality of Tock House. Small recompense has its walls proved for a glorious life lived free on the oceans. Poor old Blacky. Deprived of his beautiful craft and cheated out of the bulk of his fortune by the swindling bureaucrats of Jackals. Us stumbling around the jungle, half dead of the mortal tropical plague and the only piece of luck that’s thrown our way by the Circle is stolen by grasping counting-house men from Greenhall. Let me take you to our kitchen, girl, and I will find us some paltry fare to commiserate the rule of thieves we suffer under while we swap the sad tales of our lives.’

‘Time for that later, Jared,’ said Nickleby to the submariner. ‘I need a hand first with some boxes for Aliquot.’

Molly followed the odd pair back out to the coach house, where they began unloading crates of what looked like old newspapers from a compartment in the back of the horseless carriage. ‘You going to burn those on your fire?’

The commodore’s face was turning red with the effort of lifting out the heavy crates. ‘Burn them, lass? Burn them on the fire of Aliquot Coppertracks’ brilliance, perhaps.’

Hefting the crates back to Tock House, the two men loaded them into a dumb waiter, Nickleby pulling a cord to lift the boxes out of sight. Following the pair up a spiral staircase, Molly wished the current owners had gone to the expense of fitting Tock House with a dumb waiter for the building’s guests. But, lack of a lifting room aside, the tower had obviously had money lavished on it. The walls were lined with panels of Haslingshire oak, the floors marble and polished starstone, oil-fired chandeliers augmenting the summer light spilling in through stained-glass windows. Rainbow-bright scenes of the King having his arms cut away against a backdrop of columns of soldiers wearing roundhead-style helmets dated the building as at least six hundred years old. Built perhaps by a merchant, bishop or parliamentarian who had been on the winning side of the civil war.

Near the top of the tower they found the crates of newspaper still stacked in the cupboard-sized dumb waiter. Molly helped the pair carry the crates along the carpeted passage to its end, where a door lay slightly ajar. Black kicked the door open with one of his sailor’s boots and they lugged the boxes inside.

‘More grist for the mill, Aliquot,’ announced Nickleby.

They stood inside a hall containing the tower’s clock mechanism, the glass of the massive clockface illuminating laboratory tables covered with machinery and chemical stills, smoking glass beakers and coiled tubes filled with bubbling green liquids. The faint smell of sulphur, though, was coming from one of the steammen in the room, a squat creature sitting on two burnished orange tracks, his head a large transparent crystal dome filled with forks of ionised blue energy which seemed to rotate around the inside of his clear skull. There were other smaller steammen in the room, thin iron things the size of ten-year-old children, all identical, with bottle-shaped heads containing a single telescope-like eye. They would be some of the slipthinker’s mu-bodies, drones possessed by his intellect.

‘And blessed heavy, too,’ added the commodore. ‘The tree that gave its life for these papers must have been mortal offended by the lumberman’s axe. It’s been trying to get poor old Black’s heart to fail every step of the passage.’

‘Newspapers?’ said the tracked steamman. ‘You have brought me newspapers? Why did you not say so? Place them on the table at once.’ Its voicebox had a slight echo, making the steamman sound distracted. As soon as Nickleby and the commodore thumped the crates down, two of the small iron goblins were crawling over them, ripping out old news sheets, their telescope heads scanning the text at a breakneck pace.

Molly picked up a journal out of the box she had carried through. ‘ Field and Fern ?’

‘Ah, lass,’ said the commodore. ‘Poor old Coppertracks is a slipthinker through and through. He needs new information to process in giant quantities or he starts to act as odd as a dancing hare in Damp-month. The paper is an anchor on his boat, the weight of it keeping that shiny mind of his from rising up out of sight like a village struck by a float quake. But I don’t begrudge him the fortune we spend on subscriptions, for without him, the pensman and me would be as dead as the rest of them on the Isla Needless. There’s more cleverness in that fizzing old noggin of his than half the transaction engines in Greenhall.’

‘A young softbody,’ said Coppertracks, noticing Molly in the confusion of the laboratory for the first time. ‘ The young softbody. I know you, yes I do.’

‘I am sure I would have remembered meeting a slipthinker,’ said Molly, giving a polite little curtsey.

‘The memories of the fallen, dear mammal,’ said Coppertracks, pointing to a table pushed against the crystal wall of the clockface. On the table was a steamman skull, long cables dangling from the metal like dreadlocks.

‘The controller from the atmospheric!’ said Molly.

‘One of the people of the metal was guided to Redrust’s corpse by the Steamo Loas,’ said Coppertracks. ‘The controller’s killers had rolled his body into Old Mother Gambleflowers, hoping the waters of the river would wash over their dark deed, but at least I got to his body before some eel fisherman dredged up his cadaver and tried to sell his components on to a mechomancer.’ Coppertracks pointed to the lifeless skull. ‘Whatever torturer took him apart tried to erase his silicate boards with electromagnetic force, but they did a poor job of it. I have many partial memories, including Redrust throwing the cogs for you, Molly softbody.’

‘He helped me escape to the undercity,’ said Molly.

‘A kindness which cost him his life,’ said Coppertracks. ‘Redrust was a powerful mystic, he could ride the Loas with great accuracy.’

‘Molly was worried for two of her friends, Aliquot,’ explained Nickleby. ‘Two of the people of the metal who assisted her down in Grimhope.’

‘Indeed, dear mammal,’ said Coppertracks. ‘I have already thrown the Gear-gi-ju wheels for Slowcogs and Silver Onestack, shed my own oil for the spirits. King Steam will want to receive word of their fate along with the soul board of the controller.’

‘They were wounded when I left them,’ said Molly. ‘Seriously.’

‘It is most perplexing,’ said Coppertracks. ‘The spirits always know when one of the people of the metal has joined them. Yet the cogs I threw could not give a clear answer as to their fate. It is as if they are alive but dead at the same time. That is not something I have ever encountered before. King Steam has more powerful mystics than I at court and I hope one of them will be able to receive a truer reading.’

Molly rubbed her eyes. ‘Slowcogs, the controller, my friends at the workhouse, Onestack, everyone who has tried to help me has ended up getting hurt. They have all paid for me.’

‘These are strange days, Molly softbody,’ said Coppertracks, the lightning storm of his mind flaring up underneath his clear, egg-shaped skull. ‘There is confusion in the spirit world — our ancestors and the Steamo Loas do not rest easy. And there are disturbances in the world of information, the subtle suggestion of the hand of forces the like of which we have not encountered before, now at work. You must hold to the knowledge that the controller read your part in this and judged it important enough to give his life to keep you safe.’