Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air

‘That pollen you sniff,’ spat the Whisperer. ‘It makes you prone to hallucinations. Communing with the spirits of the earth, hugging trees, all very naturalistic.’

‘I will make it simple for you,’ said Pullinger. ‘There’s a boy who I believe you have made contact with across the spirit plane, a boy who now seems to be in league with a rogue worldsinger, self-taught, outside the order and a criminal. If you tell me where they are presently located, I will be able to get the asylum board to move you to a better cell. Real light, real food, a bed — maybe even moved to assistance duties — put your talents to state service and send you outside every now and then.’

‘State service,’ laughed the Whisperer. ‘Hunting down my kind for the Department of Feymist, perhaps? You want answers, dance around an oak circle at night with your dullard friends and ask the trees where they are.’

‘It would be better if you co-operated. For all of us.’

‘Jigger you, flower-face,’ hissed the Whisperer. ‘Let me make it simple for you . I don’t trust a word you or any of your purple-robed friends say. The last time I believed you, you motherless doxy, all it brought me was decades of rat-meat pie and a life-long problem with rising damp. I don’t know anything about Hundred Locks or seers or anything that’s been going on in the world since you jiggers shoved me down here. Now, are you going to send your pups in to try their luck or are you planning to talk me to death?’

‘I told you,’ said Shanks, thumping a toxin club into his armoured fist. ‘He’s as bad as they come. You’re not going to get anything from this one by reasoning with it.’

‘All right,’ said Pullinger irritated. ‘I will withdraw and you can try it your way. Your sigils will hold when I raise the cursewall behind you?’

The jailer nodded. ‘Things have advanced a bit since you last worked with us, inspector. We only enter with suit hexes personalized to the prisoner’s mist-cursed gifts. Give the creature long enough and it could work out a way to bypass them, but there are three of us and it’ll have some other … distractions to focus on.’

Behind the cursewall the Whisperer raised his body to his full height and spat at the shield. ‘Come on Shanks, you think I’ve got all day? It’s been years since I’ve killed a warder.’

Pullinger had withdrawn down the corridor, raising another cursewall as he backed away. Shanks nodded to the two worldsinger warders and pointed his toxin club at the misshapen inhabitant of cell eight zero nine. ‘You’ve some lumps coming, Nathaniel. Let’s see if we can knock you into something a little more pleasing to the eye.’

The inner cursewall fell and the mayhem began.

Guardian Oswald station was crowded with government functionaries, civil servants and administrators in starched shirts and high collars banded by neckties — the spattering of colours and designs subtle indications of rank and role. Red for transaction engine men, the pyramid and eyes for the Department of Domestic Rule, silver wings for the administrators who worked for Admiralty House. While pushing through the bobbing throng of stove-pipe hats, Molly, the commodore and the steamman slipthinker had to navigate their way out of the atmospheric without getting their legs bruised by the workers’ swinging canes.

Like a sea of dancing grasshopper legs the canes of the Greenhall functionaries jabbed and twisted, beating a brisk pattern on the tunnel passageways and concourses of the station. Busy, beat the rap. Important. Business to be done. Information to be processed, meetings to be chaired. Each cane also indicated its owner’s political loyalties, the lines of the canes subtly modelled on the debating sticks used by the various wards and parties — from the tapered tips of the Roarers to the flat windmill-style staffs of the Heartlanders.

‘Would you look at all the blessed scurrying rodents,’ said Commodore Black. ‘Nodding politely at each other. Good day to you, damson. Good day to you, sir. A good day every blessed day sitting in their comfortable warm offices, paid for by the robbing of honest fellows like me of the best share of my treasure. Was it any of their well-scrubbed necks that pitted their wits against the traps and creatures of the Isla Needless? Did any of these ink-stained devils have to carry half-dead bodies out of that terrible jungle, Aliquot Coppertracks? They did not, because they were too busy thinking of clever ways to carry away my wealth.’

‘It was the crown’s treasure, Jared,’ said Coppertracks, his broad caterpillar tracks carefully rolling to avoid softbody boots. ‘The state’s treasure trove laws were legitimately applied.’

‘The crown, is it? And how many of those gold bricks and trinkets did poor King Julius end up with, Aliquot Coppertracks? Him with no arms to count it and laid up in his deathbed. No, it was this dirty mob that sucked away my wealth — I must have fair paid for a thousand articled clerks for the next decade. Paid for them to sit around and think of ever more ingenious ways to steal the few crumbs of fortune they left poor Blacky with.’

‘Careful, commodore,’ whispered Molly, shocked by the man’s royalist bent. ‘There are parliamentarians here, democrats. You’ll find yourself called out.’

‘A duel, lass? Grass before breakfast. There’s not an ink-soaked courtier in any corridor of Greenhall that can best old Blacky in a game of debating sticks or tickle-my-sabre. Let the black-hearted devils try me, I’ll shake them by their wicked boots and see how many of my coins fall out of their thieving pockets.’

Coppertracks’ crystal dome crackled in annoyance. ‘My contact here is doing us a favour, commodore softbody. Your thoughts on the rapacious nature of Jackals’ bureaucracy would be better left unexpressed.’

Molly was starting to doubt the wisdom of Nickleby’s sudden departure to the scene of the latest murder by the Pitt Hill Slayer. A Whineside alderwoman with every last drop of blood sucked out of her, left to swing from the rafters of her apartment in one of the residential towers leaning over the waters of the Gambleflowers. Not only had his diversion meant they had to travel by atmospheric, but the pensman’s absence meant she was left alone between the miserable submariner and the detached steamman slipthinker. Molly laughed to herself. Reduced to travelling by the atmospheric. A couple of weeks’ residence at Tock House, and what in her workhouse days would have been an expensive adventure had been downgraded to transport of last resort after the luxury of her host’s horseless carriage.

Oh well, it was debatable whether anyone on Guardian Oswald station’s concourse retained a good enough grasp of Jackelian commontongue to appreciate the commodore’s royalist slurs. The bureaucrats of Greenhall were notorious for their use of the old pre-Chimecan tongue, Usglish — taking delight in drafting communiques, minutes and documents in the dead language. Convening meetings where the great and the good could hold forth on matters of state using flowery verbs and tenses that had been brushed aside by thousands of years of history. While the civil servants claimed that Usglish allowed nuances of inflection and semantics that facilitated their work, the real reason was obviously to allow them to run rings around their masters in the House of Guardians — while obfuscating their obligations to the voting public.

Outside the atmospheric station the street was thronged with pedestrians while hansom cabs navigated through the crowds, bringing in senior civil servants across the waterways. Topping up the nearby waters of the Gambleflowers, the complex of palaces, towers and underground transaction halls were constantly supplied by ice barges. But even with the exertion of the cooling pipes, Molly could still feel the residual heat of the giant transaction engines — like walking into an oven. Through the heat-shimmer rising off the cobbled street Molly saw the tall bell tower-like structures running up through the engine steam. There were more than the seven spires from the seven verses of the old children’s song now. Greenhall had more mother crystals than any other node on the crystalgrid, the invisible flow of information requiring legions of diminutive blue-skinned senders to process and shape it. Acres of punch cards to be fed into the banks of transaction engines each day, as much the engines’ fuel as the coke that fed their boilers.