Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air

Oliver held the arm out, bubbles of flesh climbing up the limb as he watched. ‘Do it now, before it gets to my shoulder.’

‘Let’s not,’ said the Whisperer, ‘and say we did anyway.’

Harry started in disgust at the deformed feybreed. ‘Circle be jiggered, what the hell are you?’

‘Real,’ said the Whisperer, passing through the man. ‘Which is more than I can say for you.’

Oliver was still yelling as his arm twisted and changed, but the dreamwalker reached out and held it, the limb returning to normal with his touch.

‘You’re losing your grip on your dreams,’ said the Whisperer. ‘Come on, Oliver, this is basic stuff.’

‘Whisperer. Nathaniel, thank you.’

‘Nathaniel is it now, Oliver? You’ve been charmed by our Lady of the Lights.’

‘You were there,’ said Oliver. ‘Before she appeared to me.’

‘She’s pure, Oliver. Or perhaps I should say raw — fundamental — even when she’s down here slumming with all the sentient bacteria on the skin of the world. Sharing a mind with her, well, I am like a moth trapped in the lantern room of a lighthouse.’

‘Yes,’ said Oliver. ‘She’s pure.’

‘Snap out of it, boy,’ spat the Whisperer. ‘She’s done a number on you, more than you know.’

‘What do you mean, Nathaniel?’

‘Nathaniel isn’t my name,’ hissed the Whisperer, rearing up. ‘Nathaniel was a frightened boy who was turned over to the worldsingers by his own father for the price of a couple of jinn bottles. I have better names now — there are tribes of craynarbians in Liongeli who worship me as Ka’mentar, the dream snake. Even the Whisperer is better than that stupid hamblin name.’

‘I don’t care what you want to call yourself, Whisperer, it’s all the same to me. What do you mean she’s done a number on me?’

The Whisperer scratched at his back with an oddly jointed limb. ‘Your memories, Oliver. Your early memories before you came to Hundred Locks to live with your uncle — they were always closed off to me. I thought it must have been some trauma keeping them buried, but it was her . Since her visit all the walls inside your mind have come down. I’ve been dipping into your mind, Oliver, and I’ve never seen anything like your memories before … even steammen minds make more sense than that mess, and believe me, I am a connoisseur.’

Oliver felt the skin of his arm, he could feel the hairs, touch the veins; dreams with the Whisperer seemed so real, something about the creature’s presence made the imaginings immensely vivid. ‘I don’t think you can understand their world on this side of the feymist curtain, you have to be there — live with the fast-time people to understand.’

‘You know, Oliver, call me a natural pessimist if you will,’ said the Whisperer. ‘But I have a sneaking suspicion that when the Lady of the Lights was geeing you up to lead all the beautiful people into the sunset across the feymist veil, there was not much scope for the poor old troll to crawl out from under his bridge and join them.’

‘I’m sure she didn’t mean that,’ said Oliver.

‘Didn’t she?’ hissed the Whisperer. ‘She is part of the rule-set, Oliver. When some Spencer Street trader complains about weights and measures, wags a finger at Greenhall and complains you can’t buck the system, she’s the system they’re talking about. All that if the angel had a hammer I would bethe nail nonsense. Right now, from where I’m standing, she’s rolling about a barrel of slipsharp oil, waving a match and shouting ‘fire, fire’. The Circle knows, Oliver, this turn of the wheel hasn’t exactly been kind to me — but jigger me, I still like it here. I’m not about to trade life in Jackals for that bad mumbleweed hallucination you call a childhood on the other side of the feymist curtain.’

‘We may not have a choice,’ said Oliver. ‘If our world is destroyed surely it’s better some of us live on somewhere else?’

‘We’re not meant to live there,’ insisted the Whisperer, raising a twisted arm with ears instead of fingers at the end of it. ‘Just a whiff of that filthy mist does this to more of us than not, those it doesn’t kill right off. Your children would not be human — you would not even qualify for membership after a decade more beyond the veil.’

‘Life is life,’ said Oliver. ‘I won’t let our people die out.’

‘Our people?’ hissed the Whisperer, laughing. ‘Oh, Oliver, oh, our great saviour. What are you, old man Panquetzaliztli, being visited by the gods and told to dig a warm hall under the mountains before the coldtime sweeps the land? You might be willing to roll over and help stock the Lady of the Lights’ menagerie of rare species, but I’m jiggered if I’ll lift one of my fate-cursed fingers to help her. Jackals is my country and this world is my home; if the landlord wants to move me on, she’d better send more than some abstraction with a poor attention span and some twinkle-twinkle lights — you understand? She’d better come mob-handed and be ready for a real fight.’

‘Nathaniel, Whisperer, you’re not thinking.’

‘I am thinking, Oliver,’ said the Whisperer. ‘I am just not trusting. You are waking up, boy. Best you reconsider who’s really on your side and what you are prepared to do to win.’

‘Whisperer,’ called Oliver. But he was being pulled down a tunnel, back to a cold camp on the Angelset moors.

‘What do you think, Oliver?’ said Harry. ‘Take the forest route or keep on over the bog?’

Oliver looked at the oak trees then glanced at the soggy ground of the hills. The shadows between the trees seemed darker than they should, and something about the shape of the trees was wrong. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but they did not look like the pine woodland at the foot of Hundred Locks. ‘The forest would give us cover. But I don’t know, something about it makes my skin crawl.’

‘Good instincts, old stick. The cursewall runs through the trees — the canopy of leaves masks its noise. We could be blundering through the forest one minute and dead the next.’

‘How close are we to the Commonshare?’

Harry pointed to the east. ‘Quatershift is half a mile that way. The people’s paradise, where everything belongs to everybody and no wicked lords trample the common folk of the land. And if you believe that, I’ll tell you another.’

‘You’ve been there before?’

‘I preferred it before the revolution,’ said Harry. ‘Less pofaced. Last time I was there they used the words ‘Jackelian spy’ a lot and didn’t seem to appreciate it when I pointed out that they still had a ruling class, it just called itself the First Committee. There’s always an authority, Oliver, usually mustered by the ones with the sharpest blades and the fastest rate of fire. Trust me on that. From the perspective of someone who used to be a thief — there’s always someone waiting to feel your collar. In Jackals they give you the boat or the drop — in Quatershift they shove you inside a Gideon’s Collar. You can slide a piece of paper between the difference to a poor old jack like me.’ Oliver shifted the weight of his backpack. ‘I thought you said you were an entrepreneur.’

‘Well, an entrepreneurial thief, perhaps. There I was at the heart of the Victualling Board, all the merchant lords making a fortune supplying the navy, all those cargoes and goods flowing across the land. I wouldn’t have been human if I hadn’t dipped my fingers in the honey pot a little — just to see what the taste was like, mind.’

Oliver shook his head. ‘Must have tasted a lot like the rope at Bonegate.’

‘Not my fault, Oliver. Some clever transaction engine worm at the treasury noticed a discrepancy in the books. You know the funny thing, it wasn’t even me! The quality that ran the board only had half the staff they were claiming wages for — the rest were phantoms on the books, drawing salaries that just seemed to disappear into thin air. Greenhall sent in truth-sayers, and the quality needed some meat to throw to the dogs to keep their own necks from being stretched. So they put Harry chops on the menu.’