Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air

Commodore Black examined the cane. ‘A Roarer? I’ve never voted Roarer in my blessed life.’

‘Maybe not, but you look like you could lay about you with that stick good and proper, so Roarer it is.’

The odd-looking party walked through a series of passages and chambers. Molly was amazed nobody challenged them. But then, these corridors did not seem home to any of the bustle she had seen at the mills, tanneries and laundries she had been hawked out to by the poor board at Sun Gate. None of the anxiety of meeting targets and piece-work quotas. The underlying fear that if you got sick, ill or fell behind, or if Jackals’ economy entered one of its regular recessions, your cog-like position would prove infinitely exchangeable with other members of the desperate horde of Middlesteel’s deserving poor. People walked the corridors of Greenhall as if they were taking a morning constitutional along the topiary gardens of Goldhair Park.

Molly’s heart nearly stopped when a craynarbian passed them and nodded a greeting at them. ‘Que seog ti nam engine?’

‘Ho ton or mal,’ replied Binchy.

‘That old language,’ said Commodore Black as the craynarbian disappeared down the hall. ‘Must you lot in here always be blabbering on in it?’

‘It has a certain elegance,’ said Binchy, ‘once you get used to it. Besides, it’s the sorcerer’s cloak.’

Molly looked at the man. ‘Sorcerer’s cloak?’

‘Same reason that worldsingers wear their purple robes, Molly, same reason magistrates and doomsmen put on their wigs and powder, same reason engine men talk about taking transaction drums offsteam rather than just saying turn them off. Every trade likes to talk up their job with a little mystique and hide its doings with a lot of words that don’t do much more than make what is very simple very complex.’ Binchy nodded at another passing civil servant. ‘Keeps wages up, makes what you do seem bleeding important, and stops your profession from being flooded by Johnny-come-lately types setting up shop in competition just down the street. As for you, Jared, you’re a fine one to be lecturing me. You forgot the time you forced me along to the colonies on that iron bucket of yours, you and those salty coves of yours? Hard to port, hard to starboard, down inclination four degrees … or is that left, right, up and down? I never heard so much meaningless cant as when I was under the waves with you on the Sprite of the Lake .’

A set of sweeping stairs and ramps took them down to a smaller corridor lined in red Jackelian oak wood. There was a doorless lift waiting there, dozens of ivory button pulls indicating the depths to which Greenhall had encroached. Some of the lower floors probably shook when the atmospheric fired past.

‘Department of Blood is on this level,’ explained Binchy. ‘Its transaction engines are down for emergency maintenance this morning — well, that’s what the staff have been told anyway. Just some of my people there pretending to be busy.’

‘An effective ruse, Binchy softbody,’ said Coppertracks.

‘Some of the medical people are pretty fair mechomancers in their own right, old steamer,’ said Binchy. ‘But anyone who knows enough to challenge us received an invitation from the university for a seminar running today on developments in blood cataloguing. You see-’ he tapped the side of his head ‘-forward thinking. The mark of all geniuses.’

Cogs and calculation drums littered the floor of the chamber that Binchy directed them to. Engine men in brown leather aprons were climbing up into the room. Molly peered over the edge of the railed balcony where their ladder emerged. Bank after bank of house-sized transaction engines receded into the distance, some with calculation drums as wide as the jinn barrels in the Angel’s Crust, hundreds of them revolving and clacking in the half-light. Engine boys sailed over the subterranean hall on pulleys, grease cans at the ready where bearings had started smoking.

Binchy pointed at the mechanisms and control drums on the floor. ‘Hey, I need this bleeding working.’

‘Keep your hair on, Bincher,’ one of the engine men called back. ‘These are the spare parts we pulled from the Bessy ninety-eight over at Prisons and Corrective — you told us to make it look offsteam. Hanging up an out of order sign wasn’t going to do it, was it?’

Binchy winked at Coppertracks. ‘Initiative, ain’t it?’ He went over to a panel overlooking the transaction engine pit and pulled a speaking tube out of its copper clip. ‘This is the Department of Blood, room five, level one. Stoke up all the furnaces for us, we’re going to be running live tests until lunch.’

Replacing the speaking tube on the wall, he walked over to a card puncher where a couple of the brown-aproned engine men were working.

‘Bincher, you’ve got head of department access from here now,’ said the taller of the two workers to Binchy. His companion pushed a bank of equipment mounted on rollers around behind their station; Molly prodded the machine — it was full of miniature gears and switches, but on the front facing them stood row after row of tiny square cubes — like an abacus with a thousand too many beads.

‘Latest issue,’ said the cardsharp, patting the contraption. ‘Just coming in from the royal workshops at Exwater this summer.’

Molly rolled one of the square beads between her fingers — each side of the cube was alternating white and black. ‘So, this is a substitute for a tape printer? The cubes can be rotated to make patterns — shapes, words, maybe even pictures.’

‘Blimey,’ exclaimed Binchy. ‘You a subscriber to the Journalof Philosophical Transactions or something, girl? You can’t have seen a Radnedge Rotator before. There’s only four of them in all of Greenhall.’

‘I’ve sat in the stalls at the theatre when they’ve been showing daguerreotype images of explorations and far-off lands,’ said Molly. ‘This looks like the same thing. But for transaction engines, naturally.’

‘Naturally.’ Binchy looked suspiciously at the girl. ‘Listen, Molly, you get any more ideas like that before you see the gear, you come and see the Bincher. I’ll introduce you to my friends up in the patent office.’

‘Molly softbody seems to have an intuitive talent for such matters,’ said Coppertracks.

Binchy looked with interest at Molly. ‘Does she now?’ He loaded a deck of blank cards into the station’s punch machine. Its keyboard was as wide as the piano that Damson Darnay used to play for the children in the workhouse, but far more complex, numbers and alphabetical script supplemented by hundreds of keys painted with the symbolic logic language cardsharps ironically called Simple.

‘Let’s see what we can see,’ said Binchy. ‘Molly, you know your citizen number?’

Molly closed her eyes and reeled off the personal twenty-digit code that was drilled into each Jackelian child, Binchy’s fingers dancing across the keyboard as she talked.

‘Good memory, girl.’

‘I had to give it to my employers too,’ said Molly. ‘I had a lot of them.’

‘Can’t settle to a trade? I was that way myself before my cousin got my engine man apprenticeship sorted.’ Binchy passed the serrated card he had typed to Commodore Black. ‘Skipper, can you do the honours, please?’

Commodore Black fed the card into the reader and pulled the loading lever. Down in the transaction engine pit the background noise of the rotating drums picked up into a symphony of tapping and cracking, like the sound of a whole forest of trees being snapped apart by a clumsy giant. ‘Ah, Binchy. It’s just like being back on the Sprite of the Lake . Navigating the Fire Sea blind with nothing but the maths of a roll of stolen charts to see us through.’