Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air

Harry pointed at the bodies huddled in the wreckage. ‘That’s the true power of evil. You think the people that made those poor jacks’ lives so unbearable the only choice that was left to them was to trust their fate to the wind and a bag of cloth; you think they think of themselves as wicked? In their own minds the rulers of the Commonshare are princes on white horses, Oliver, dispensing justice and largesse and making the world a better place. Even as they’re tossing burning torches onto the thatched roofs of them , even as their boots stamp on the fingers of the children of them , in their daydreams the First Committee are heroes, beating down the obstacles to perfection one corpse at a time. Funny thing is, the litany of cant the victors chant over the bodies of the innocent might sound different for each big idea, but you know what, it always sounds like the same jiggering words to me.’

Harry threw the canvas back over the bodies in disgust, covering their empty shells. ‘They used flags to make it. That’s fitting. More flags in the Commonshare now than blankets.’

‘I can still see them,’ said Oliver.

‘Yes you can. And you will for years. And next time you meet some holy jacks banging on about how the Circle will save you, ask them what their views on the next election are. And when you meet Carlists banging on about how the party will make you free, you ask them what their faith in spirit is. Because the big idea suffers no rival obsessions to confuse its hosts, no dissent, no deviation or heresy from its perfection. You want to know what these poor sods really died for, Oliver? They died for a closed mind too small to hold more than a single truth.’

The wolftaker took out the jug of slipsharp oil and sprinkled black pools of the thick liquid over the crumpled skin of the makeshift balloon. ‘Time to burn the flags, I think.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Oliver. To the family, to the moor-bitten wind, to no one in particular.

Harry stuck a match and threw it onto the canvas, flames leaping up and crackling across the fabric. ‘One day you’ll face a trial, Oliver. A difficult task that may seem impossible. A choice you can’t confront. When that time comes, you remember these three here on this day. Remember all the details you’re going to try so hard to forget. Then you’ll know what you need to do.’

‘Is that what you do, Harry?’

‘Your father told me that, Oliver,’ said the wolftaker. ‘And he was right too. I’ve seen so many bodies for so many big ideas. Sometimes it’s the only way you can make yourself go on.’

The fire reached across the length of the quilt. At the head of the hill the remaining mist of the day was spreading out towards the sky as smoke billowed and curled around the wreckage of the flimsy vessel. Oliver looked on in amazement. The mist was coalescing into a body. Were the ghosts of the poor dead family returning to visit their own pyre?

‘Harry!’

‘I see it,’ said the wolftaker.

Slowly the mist took shape — a horned warrior in armour — no, not armour — the plate metal was its body … a steamman.

‘Harry, what in the Circle’s name?’

‘Steamo Loa,’ said Harry. ‘One of their gods — an ancestral spirit.’

As they watched, the spectral figure pointed a mailed glove towards the south, its head slowly shaking in warning, then it turned to the east and pointed a hand in the direction of the distant mountains — the Steammen Free State. The meaning was clear.

‘It doesn’t want us to go to Shadowclock, Harry.’

‘Jigger me sideways, now I really have seen everything. Unless there’s a worldsinger behind that hill laughing himself silly; but why?’

In answer to the disreputable Stave’s question a strange howl rent the air, like a human in pain screaming through the throat of a wolf.

‘What was that sound, Harry?’

Harry looked at the mist above the hill — the shape of the steamman now shredding into ribbons in the sky. ‘Nothing that should be this far north of the Cassarabian border. Run for the mountains, boy. Fast — NOW.’

Sprinting back through the graveyard of the battlefield, Oliver glanced behind them. Nothing. Just the wreckage of the Quatershiftian refugees’ escape attempt.

‘Your blunderbuss,’ Harry called across to Oliver. ‘The gun, unstrap it and load up.’

Harry was pulling his long pistol out of his pack as he ran, breaking it and slipping in a charge. Oliver’s bell-muzzled gun was jouncing along the side of his folded tent — strapped just the way the wolftaker had shown him. One pull of the fastening and the weapon was falling, its wooden handle in his right hand. Thumbing the release as he ran, he broke the gun in the middle so that the barrel was swinging towards the ground on its hinge. The crystal charge felt like ice in his hand, fingers fumbling to push it into the breach. It dropped in perfectly and the blunderbuss clacked shut with a gentle push from the heel of his palm.

Oliver scanned the landscape behind them. ‘I can’t hear the noise anymore.’

‘Close,’ puffed Harry. ‘Hunting silent.’

Something hammered Oliver into the boggy mud, arcing past and barrelling into the wolftaker; rolling Harry to the ground, a mass of exposed pulsing muscles — as if the creature had allowed its skin and fur to be flayed from its body. Oliver got back to his feet. The creature’s paws were smashing the ground and Harry was a blur, using his worldsinger tricks again, dodging the thing’s claws even as it had him trapped.

Like the crack of snapping wood something pinged off the rocks to Oliver’s right, showering his shoulder with flinty dust. Redcoats stood on the hills where Oliver and Harry had been heading before the spectre’s warning, holding long spindly rifles with bayonets fixed on their barrels, barrels that were pointing towards him.

Harry was rolling in the mud with the hunting monster. Even if he had been a marksman, not an amateur with a sailor’s boarding gun, Oliver couldn’t let a shot off without hitting them both. There was a growl and Oliver looked up at the granite outcrop he had backed into just as the second beast leapt down on him. Oliver screamed as the hunter clawed into his left arm, the weight whamming him down to the watery soil, desperately shoving the blunderbuss into the monster’s mouth. It was ripping the naval pattern out of his hand as he triggered the weapon, an explosion of buckshot and thunder ricocheting off the rock — most of it peppering the creature’s flank, one of the lead pellets glancing across Oliver’s cheek and tearing it open.

Oliver tried to scramble out from under the beast as its wounds momentarily distracted it, but it was too quick, the buckshot a mere inconvenience. Reaching out it cuffed Oliver in the back and sent him sprawling, then lunged forward, snarling. It sounded like it was talking, idiot words mangled by a lolling tongue and razor teeth. ‘Eta flug, eta flug.’

Terrified, Oliver met its gaze — the eyes of a human girl, long lashes and blue irises buried in its skull plate looking back at him — angry, angry inhuman rage. Those beautiful eyes blinked in surprise as the ground beneath them disinte-grated, boy and beast carried into the air as clods of mud rained down onto the earth. Floatquake or some desperate worldsinger magic called by Harry? But Oliver was tumbling off something, a rusting metal shell rising out of the soil, water pouring out of gashes and hollows.

The startled hunter had rolled off him, leaving Oliver’s left arm a furnace of agony, and leapt into the metal sculpture rising out of the mud. It was a corpse, one of the knights steammen, only one battle arm still intact — a pike arm with a rusted brown blade. Metal and muscle joined in a fusion of combat, the panther-sized hunting beast lashing back and forth with its claws, tearing gashes in the zombie’s already broken hull. For its part, the steamman corpse was twist-pumping its pike arm into the beast’s dense stomach muscles. The only sign of the damage it was doing was the red gore slicking its blade.