Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air

Molly started to head to one of the open gates where crowds of Jackelians were waiting with chits and half-completed forms — supplicants ready to be fed into the bureaucratic grinder — but Coppertracks clamped his iron fingers around her arm. ‘No need to queue, Molly softbody. I have a contact on the inside — this way.’

Coppertracks rolled down Greenhall Avenue, past ranks of stalls serving the eels and dartfish that swarmed around the heat exchangers in the riverbank. The steamman slipthinker led them to a pub opposite one of Greenhall’s staff gates, the Jingo Dancer, an engineman’s tavern judging by all the sun-aged punch cards shoved behind the window — cheap binary humour and messages swapped between the patrons.

It might have been early morning but the pub was heaving with workers from the night shift. The fashion for cheap imported jinn had yet to catch up with the minions of Greenhall’s Data Directorate. Trays of ale were hurried across to the dirt-fingered furnace hands, muscles taut from shovelling coke in the underground engine halls. Bar staff scurried around drum engineers whose beards were braided in the mechomancer fashion; the scene watched in leaafed detachment by cardsharps sitting in leather chairs while they puffed mumbleweed pipes and chased abstractions in their minds.

The commodore groaned. ‘Not him again, the blessed rat — and it’s his advice we are to be trusting?’

A slim cardsharp with curly orange hair and a bald spot that had spread out into a monk-like tonsure beckoned them towards a sofa — hanging back from the commodore’s reach, as if he suspected the large submariner was about to lay into him.

‘This is the filly?’ asked the cardsharp, looking Molly over. ‘Looks like a Middlesteel girl through and through.’

‘Keep your eyes to yourself, engine boy,’ said Molly. ‘And your hands.’

‘Just taking an interest, love,’ said the cardsharp. ‘No need to take on airs. Coppertracks, you got what we agreed?’

Coppertracks’ dome skull lit up the dark corner as he considered his answer. ‘If you can arrange the access we require, Binchy softbody.’

‘When’s old Binchy ever let you down?’ said the cardsharp. ‘And it hasn’t been easy, don’t think it has. I’ve called in favours; lots of friends of friends will be looking the other way this morning.’

The commodore leant in close to the cardsharp. ‘Good friends are these, Binchy? Like the same clever fellows who got their hands on my charts for the Fire Sea?’

Binchy flinched back. ‘I told you, Jared. I bleeding told you. Those came from ordinance survey charts based on navy salvage from a wrecked empire boat. You think the God-Emperor knows anything about submarine navigation?’

‘Just enough to get the Sprite of the Lake cooked and wrecked off the wicked shores of the Isla Needless.’

‘You got back, didn’t you, and a sight wealthier than when you left. You like the sea so bleeding much, Jared, you spend some of your pile on a new boat.’

‘Don’t act the blessed fool,’ said the commodore. ‘You know why that would be a bad idea.’

The cardsharp touched the side of his nose. ‘A nod is as good as a wink, skipper. Wasn’t it old Binchy that came through for you in that little matter as well? Now, given that Coppertracks is somewhat lacking in the old pockets department, I assume that it is you or the filly who is carrying my stuff?’

The commodore nodded and pulled out a thin parcel wrapped in brown paper from underneath his crimson waistcoat. Binchy caressed it, almost as if he was afraid to touch the parcel lest it disappear, then he carefully folded back the paper to reveal five punch cards, black with trim that shone silver in the tavern’s gas light. Molly peered across to get a better look. The pinholes had left a tattoo of transaction engine code, tantalizing her. She wanted to run her fingers across the pattern, feel the information, hold the cards.

‘This will work — or at least help?’ asked Binchy.

‘At least help,’ said Coppertracks. ‘I am a slipthinker, after all.’

‘Yes,’ said Binchy. ‘Clever. Bleeding clever, you are Coppertracks. Your thoughts are all energy and light — mine are just clumsy meat. Like butcher’s steak laid out on a slab.’

‘Many vessels,’ said Coppertracks — one of the steammen race’s better known mottos.

‘Many vessels,’ Binchy sighed. ‘Some better made than others. I’ll leave now. You follow me in three minutes. Go through the gate opposite, no one will challenge you. I’ll meet you inside.’

Molly watched as the press of workers in the pub absorbed the curly-haired weasel. ‘He’s willing to get dismissed from Greenhall for the price of a few engine cards?’

‘Ah, lass, I doubt if old Binchy does much work in Greenhall,’ said the commodore. ‘He’s burrowed in deep, like a tapeworm he is. They’ll never turf him out.’

‘The transaction engines inside Greenhall are massive, complex,’ said Coppertracks. ‘System upon system, added to over the ages. Primitive but powerful. The engine men that tend them understand the parts but no longer comprehend the whole, and like any sufficiently complex system, the engines develop parasites and diseases — information sickness. Binchy’s wife worked here with him as a cardsharp, but she was infected by one of the parasites — an occupational hazard that the engine men risk.’

‘Dear, blessed Becky,’ said the commodore. ‘A mortal shame, the poor girl lying in bed all day and night, babbling nonsense in binary.’

‘Those cards are a cure?’ said Molly.

‘I fear not,’ said Coppertracks. ‘The ecosystem of a transaction engine is fixed, Molly softbody. I can cure such a sickness in the drums, boards and switches of a transaction engine, but once an information sickness has jumped across to one of your minds it evolves as fast as I can develop predator maths to remove it. Those cards will give Binchy softbody perhaps a day of lucidity with his life mate. Then she will be overcome by the parasite again, and return to her madness.’

They gave the cardsharp a couple of minutes’ lead, then departed the Jingo Dancer and followed the clerks and bureaucrats in through the gate opposite. While the officials pushed small identity punch cards into a turnstile reader, a Greenhall whipper opened a small gate at the side for Molly, Coppertracks and the commodore. Surreptitiously the guard glanced about to make sure that nobody had noticed their passage through the staff entrance, then silently returned to his duties. Binchy had greased the right palms this time.

As was their wont, the mandarins and courtiers of Greenhall had not stinted on their accommodation; acres of interconnected marble floors branched out in front of the three visitors — storey after storey of higher levels rising off the expansive atrium. Greenhall worked with the House of Guardians as assiduously as they had served the kings that had preceded them. No doubt if the Carlists had their way and the boulevards were decorated with the corpses of democrats and merchant lords, the one unchanging constant at the heart of Jackals would be the bureaucrats in this palace of paper and administration. Molly did not doubt that the mandarins of Greenhall would diligently draw up the lists of notables to be fed into the Gideon’s Collar if it meant they could keep safe their comfortable positions.

Binchy came out from behind a row of busts on tall graniteplinths. He had with him a small handcart piled with formstied with green ribbon. ‘Molly, yes? You push this.Coppertracks you act flash with that head of yours. As foryou, skipper-’ Binchy tossed the commodore a cane. ‘Justlook permanently dissatisfied; that should come naturallyenough to you. Anyone tries to talk to us, you scowl at them.’