Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air

‘And my father helped you escape.’

‘Wasn’t so much an escape, Oliver, as a graduation. The wolftakers might as well rename Bonegate as their finishing school. Normally the Court of the Air just fakes a death in the cells — but there were too many navy jacks and Greenhall types waiting to see me dance the Bonegate jig for the crowds, so I went over the wall. Of course, I would have escaped on my own if push had come to shove. My neck’s a little too precious to me to see it stretched for the sins of the penny dippers that sit on the Victualling Board.’

‘But you were defrauding them,’ said Oliver.

‘Spoken like the true nephew of a merchant,’ said Harry. ‘It’s the principle of the thing — you don’t let another jack hang for a crime which you committed yourself. The lowest angler in the rookeries, the slipperiest highwayman on the Innverney Road would tell you the same — but that’s one fashion that hasn’t caught up with the quality yet.’

Oliver pushed on across the wet ground. ‘I’m glad they didn’t make you catch the drop, Harry.’

‘Me too,’ said the disreputable Stave, fingering his neck with a shiver. ‘Now take the Commonshare over there. What a racket; I wish I’d thought of that one. I’d have got the rope for a few missing bales of aerostat canvas — but you travel a mile over the border and they stole the whole country and convinced everyone in the place to become an accomplice. Masterful. Bleeding masterful.’

They walked on, skirting the forest and then crossing the wet low hills that opened up before them. Oliver was wondering when they would pitch up for lunch when he stubbed his boot against an iron pipe, nearly tumbling over across the boggy ground. Angry with himself for not spotting the metal he gave it a kick. ‘Looks like someone’s chimney.’

‘Not a chimney,’ said Harry, pointing along the grass. ‘That’s a steamman stack.’

Oliver followed the sweep of the wolftaker’s hand. Fragments of metal jutted out across the slopes — broken fingers clutching for the heavens, the horns of helmet-like heads, ancient iron bodies smashed open — home now only to frogs and nesting moorhens.

The place looked cold, hard and bleak. ‘A graveyard?’

‘Of sorts, Oliver. This was a battlefield. We’ve reached the Drammon Broads — further east is the mouth of the Steammen Free State. The cursewall swings around their territory too; the Commonshare doesn’t trust Jackals’ oldest ally.’

‘Circle’s turn, Harry, how many dead are there here?’

‘Enough, Oliver. Marshal Adecole marched the Sixth Brigade of the People’s Army through the mountains at the start of the Two-Year War. King Steam’s knights broke the back of them down here. Most of the trenches have filled in now, but if you dug deep enough, you’d find the bones and rotting shakos of Quatershift’s elite troops — the pieces the foxes haven’t dragged away.’

Perhaps the old battlefield had unsettled the disreputable Stave too, because he kept up his commentary like one of the tourist entertainers who haunted the foot of the waterways at Hundred Locks, filling the eerie silence with the life of his voice. The rotting spokes of light artillery wheels, the shattered glass of old cannon charges, rusting harpoons from Commonshare anti-steammen ordinance, lead balls from Free State pressure repeaters — each picked out as landmarks on the gruesome wartime tour.

After the ranks of buried, mud-drowned corpses fell away, Oliver spotted a splash of red on the side of the hill — out of place, as if someone had spread a gaudy picnic blanket over the gloomy brown slopes. ‘That looks fresh.’

‘A bizarre enough sight out here, old stick,’ agreed Harry. ‘Let’s take a closer peek.’

As they got nearer Oliver saw that the object was not as uniform as it first appeared. What he had taken for a solid crimson swathe was a patchwork of oblongs stitched together, mostly red, but some with stripes and yellow suns sewn on. They were flags, pieced together by wiry cord — river fisherman’s netting by the look of it; the large wave of canvas lying crumpled over a mound.

‘What is it, Harry?’

The wolftaker looked towards the east, his lips pursed. ‘Let’s go, lad.’

‘What is it? It looks like flags.’

‘You don’t need to know — let’s just keep going south.’

Oliver took the corner of the canvas and tipped it up. There was a blanket underneath, a huddle of sacks with … a field of fungus-like balloons growing out of them. This was a strange way to farm mushrooms. But then Oliver saw the lines of legs, arms, hands, a couple clutching tightly at each other. Dear Circle, that was a baby they were holding between them, its feet as tiny as a doll’s — so small and grey he could not even see if it was a boy or a girl. Bile rose in Oliver’s throat and before he knew what he was doing his breakfast was vomiting over the grass as he stumbled towards the family to see if any of them were alive.

Harry seized his arm. ‘Don’t touch them. You can’t help them now.’

‘They might be alive, they might be.’

‘Oliver, no. They’ve been through the cursewall. Those things growing on them are from the hex — sometimes their hearts give out, sometimes they start sprouting plague spores, sometimes they might age a hundred years or have their blood turn to stone. They were dead the moment their balloon lost height and they blew through the wall.’

‘They can’t have had a balloon.’ Oliver was crying. ‘They don’t have balloons in Quatershift.’

‘They don’t have celgas, Oliver. They don’t have aerostats. But take canvas, fire, hot air … you have a balloon. Not good enough to get them over the cursewall, but how were they to know? I doubt if there’s many engineers left on their side of the wall now.’

Oliver couldn’t take his eyes off the human wreckage — bodies that once laughed, cried, walked, lived, now just bags of flesh, no spark of what had made them human. How could it be? One moment something vital with hopes and dreams, the next nothing — compost for a hex-born toadstool.

Oliver sunk to his knees. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘I wish you hadn’t had to find out,’ said the wolftaker.

‘But you knew, Harry.’

‘Most of the refugees come by water, Oliver. Can’t run a cursewall under the water — over it, but not under it. And yes, I’ve seen this before. During the worst of the famine years the refugees even tried building a catapult to throw themselves over the wall. It would almost have been funny, if you hadn’t seen how thin the bodies were that rained down on Jackals.’

Oliver’s throat had dried up. ‘Why?’

‘Why?’ said Harry. ‘For the big idea, Oliver. Someone comes up with the big idea — could be religion, could be politics, could be the race you belong to, or your clan, or philosophy, or economics, or your sex or just how many bleeding guineas you got stashed in the counting house. Doesn’t matter, because the big idea is always the same — wouldn’t it be good if only everyone was the same as me — if only everyone else thought and acted and worshipped and looked like me, everything would become a paradise on earth.

‘But people are too different, too diverse to fit into one way of acting or thinking or looking. And that’s where the trouble starts. That’s when they show up at your door to make the ones who don’t fit vanish, when, frustrated by the lack of progress and your stupidity and plain wrongness at not appreciating the perfection of the big idea, they start trying to shave off the imperfections. Using knives and racks and axe-men and camps and Gideon’s Collars. When you see a difference in a person and can find only wickedness in it — you and them — the them become fair game, not people anymore but obstacles to the greater good, and it’s always open season on the them .’