Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air

There was a bathroom at the end of the corridor; perhaps a glass of water would settle her insomnia. She needed no lantern; the corridor was fitted with miniature chandelier clusters, pressure fed with slipsharp oil and ignited by a clockwork timer. The whole house seemed a faddish monument to machine-time, the clock tower imposing its artificial order on the passage of the day, splitting it neatly into minutes and hours — switching the lights on for darkness and dimming them for dawn.

Yawning, Molly turned and saw a figure at the end of the corridor — it looked like a child. But … someone familiar. Her heart turned cold. She did know her. She was the girl from Silver Onestack’s visions, painted by the steamman across hundreds of canvas illustrations. Had the girl disappeared from Onestack’s dreams when Molly fixed the steamman’s broken vision plate? Was she looking for a new host to haunt?

A keening moan sounded and it took every ounce of courage Molly possessed not to break and flee screaming. The girl pointed out of the window into the night beyond — the moaning was coming from the garden, not the girl at all. A cough from one of the bedrooms distracted Molly for a second; someone else was waking up in the house. Molly glanced back. The apparition had vanished. Walking forward, she pressed her face against the cold glass, staring down onto the lawn.

Sharparms was standing sentry like a stone lion in front of Tock House, while stumbling across the grass was Nickleby. The pensman was the source of the animal-like cry, his arms raised in supplication to the heavens. In his right hand he held a crystal glass hookah, mumbleweed smoke rising from its mouth pipe like green mist into the cool night air. Following in his wake were two of Coppertracks’ iron goblins, the drones trying to convince the journalist to return to the warmth of the house, dragging and clutching at his bed robes.

A hand rested itself on Molly’s shoulder and she yelped, jumping back.

‘Molly, it is only me,’ said the commodore. ‘So you’ve been woken up by the noise too.’

‘What’s going on down there? Silas is dancing around on the grass, half out of his mind by the looks of it.’

‘Leaafed again. That’s too bad, poor Silas. A little puff of the weed can settle a person down for the night and ward off bad dreams, but he smokes too blessed much, reaching for oblivion in the southern fashion.’

Nickleby had half collapsed on the grass and Coppertracks’ diminutive servants were trying to prop him up, their birdlike iron feet trampling the liquid the hookah had spilled across the lawn. In his horseless carriage, on the pocket aerostat, Molly suddenly realized that the pensman had never seemed to be too far away from his mumbleweed pipe.

‘Leaafed for a ha’penny, dead leaafed for two,’ said Molly, repeating the old jinn-house adage.

‘Ah, Molly,’ said Black. ‘You don’t know what that man has seen. The horrors.’

‘You mean the Pitt Street slayings?’

‘Not them, lass, though I don’t doubt that would turn a person’s stomach, those poor dead wretches — no, I mean his days in the war.’

‘Against Quatershift?’ said Molly. ‘He said he’d been in the navy, but flying an ink blotter — I thought he was writing propaganda for Greenhall or something.’

‘He was in the sharp crew, Molly. All the clever-clever types from the eight great universities, the order, the military. Strategy, mind games and black sorcery. Silas was one of the best, a real-box master and a creative thinker. They were running some grand scams, so they were — cracking Commonshare codes with the great machines at Greenhall, writing forged letters to families back in Quatershift from prisoners that had died at the front. Telling the shifties how well they were being treated in Jackals, what beasts the Committee’s officers were — all the atrocities they were forced to commit. Silas was as good at faking daguerreotypes as he was at taking real-box pictures in the first place.

‘The sharp crew would fake daguerreotypes of the First Committee throwing banquets with naked bawdy girls on the table as dessert, Dock Street would print them up, and then our aerostats would drop them on the front line. Imagine, lass, if you were a Carlist soldier stuck in the mud at Drinnais while you knew your family were half-starving back in the fields, then you got to see your leaders living high on the hog and pouring wine down each other’s naked throats. There wasn’t much fight left in the conscript regiments of their brigades by the time the sharp crew had their mortal fun with them.’

Out on the lawn Nickleby had fallen flat on the grass in front of the sphinx-like steamman sentry; Coppertracks’ mu-bodies had no trouble loading his weeping form onto their shoulders and climbing the steps back to the house.

‘You should hide his pipe,’ said Molly.

‘He needs it, lass, to blot out the memories of Reudox.’

‘The city we bombed?’

‘The city we dirt-gassed, Molly. The sharp crew sent Silas out to Reudox with his real-box. After the attack the airship crew went down in masks and lined up all the shiftie bodies, a nice long line of corpses. Not soldiers or mill workers mind, but the ones who would make for a good daguerreotype picture back on the front line. Children in committee-school uniforms, mothers, babies, and old men clinging onto grandmothers, a good long line of mortal innocents. And then the sharp crew took real-box pictures of them for a series of accordion-folded news sheets, the house number and street name where each body had been found printed underneath. We dropped those pictures of the corpses on top of the people’s army and let them pass them to the soldiers who came from Reudox.’

Molly felt sick. ‘We did that to the shifties?’

‘After the navy dropped the pictures on all the main shiftie cities, the Commonshare folded. Despite all their purges, all their secret police, all their informers, the Carlists would have been fed into a Gideon’s Collar if they had let any more of their cities be gassed. The shifties folded and clung to power and poor blessed Silas still tries to smoke away the faces of the dead babies at Reudox.’

‘Have you seen any of them?’ Molly asked. ‘The children I mean. As spectres at Tock House?’

The commodore took a step back. ‘Unquiet spirits, lass? Do not speak of such things. Tock House is big enough for us, but not for all the poor ghosts of Reudox. Haven’t we suffered enough in this life without having to comfort the poor souls denied passage along the Circle?’

‘You haven’t seen a ghost in these corridors?’

‘There may be ghosts here, lass, but they keep to themselves — and let us leave it at that. Come, Molly, let’s help Aliquot Coppertracks put Silas back to bed and then we will cure our unsettled rest with a warm glass of mulled wine and a slice or two of ham.’

Molly let the commodore lead her downstairs, but she felt a cold shiver as she stepped through the spot where the spectral girl had been standing. She had hoped Tock House was going to be a sanctuary from the people who wanted her dead, but with Silver Onestack’s vision following her around and her self-professed protector a half-insane leaafer, the protection of The Middlesteel Illustrated and its staff was starting to look distinctly flimsy.

Oliver stared with horror at his right hand, the wrist swelling up like a black balloon, hair and muscles rippling, more like the limb of a bear now than anything human.

‘I told you not to go near any of the ruins,’ shouted Harry.

‘I thought I heard someone calling,’ said Oliver. ‘Someone who needed help.’

The disreputable Stave brandished the witch-knife that Mother had gifted to Oliver. ‘You’re the one who needs help now, lad. Your arm has got to come off below the elbow before it infects your entire body. Mage-war, Oliver, the earth-flow particles are active in your bloodstream — you’ll go into shock in three minutes unless I take it off.’