Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air

Steamswipe gazed with contempt at the two visitors. ‘Fastbloods — I would sooner trust Adjasou-Rust not to bite my hand than trust another Jackelian to watch over my back.’

‘What does he mean, another ?’ Oliver whispered to the king’s drone.

The mu-body shook its head with sadness. ‘There were two softbody guides on his last venture deep into the darks of Liongeli.’

‘So what did they do to Steamswipe?’

‘It’s not so much what the guides did to him, young soft-body,’ said King Steam. ‘It is what he did to them. Steamswipe staved in the skull of one of the guides with his war hammer, the other he impaled on a spear.’

King Julius’s chambers were a shadow of what they had been — only the grand dimensions gave any clue that they once housed the absolute monarch of Jackals, master of an entire nation. Like the man himself they had fallen into a state of disrepair. Julius’s hacking cough echoed off the bare walls, a rasping, rattling thing, sounding more alive than its owner now seemed.

Captain Flare stared down at the skeletal form stretched underneath the blanket, the rough wool all that warded off the damp of the chambers. It was summer so no fire burned in the hearth. Parliament had voted on that many years ago: fuel to be expended on the royal person only from the month of Frost-touch onwards — a petty economy that must have given the guardians who voted for it more warmth than it deprived King Julius of. He was barely lucid now, gripped by another bout of waterman’s sickness. Each fever reduced him slightly more than the last.

‘What’s he saying, captain?’ asked Prince Alpheus. ‘It sounded like something about lice.’

‘Not lice,’ said the Commander of the Special Guard. ‘Alice. Your mother.’

‘Mother. Yes. I wish I had met her.’

‘The House of Guardians probably wouldn’t have allowed it,’ said Flare. ‘Even if she hadn’t been returned to the royal breeding pool, even if she hadn’t…’

‘… died of the crinkleskin?’ said Alpheus. ‘I am always surprised by the number of royals who die of plagues and fevers at the breeding house. I am surprised they are still able to scrape together the blood of a squire’s daughter, let alone a duchess, to pair me off with.’

‘It’s fair to say that medical care has not been a priority over there.’

‘It has not been a priority here either,’ said Alpheus.

Flare shrugged. ‘Waterman’s sickness is the perfect illness for our democratic state — it strikes guardians and undermaids with equal ferocity, and once you get it, all the money in Sun Gate can’t help you.’

‘They say the heat and dryness of Cassarabia helps the afflicted.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Flare. ‘But I don’t think parliament trusts the caliphs any more than they do your father,’

‘It’s odd that I never get sick,’ said Alpheus. ‘Not even a cold in winter. I obviously don’t get that from either my father or mother.’

‘Your mother was tough,’ said Flare. ‘It took the conditions in the royal breeding house to wear her down.’

Alpheus stared down at his father. ‘He still remembers her.’

‘She was a hard woman to forget, Your Highness.’

A line of Special Guardsmen stood sentry at the far end of the bedchamber, by the light patches on the wall where rich tapestries would have once hung, their silent faces watching the slow death of the King. Flare waved them away and they turned smartly, filing out in a disciplined line. All except Bonefire.

‘You can go too,’ said Flare.

‘I was hoping the pup would lose his nerve — leave the job to a man.’

‘Surely not concern for me, Bonefire?’ said the prince. ‘You just wanted to do the thing yourself.’

‘Novelty value,’ replied the Special Guardsman. ‘It’s been a while since anyone let me have my head and I do miss the old days.’

‘You could let him do it,’ said Captain Flare. ‘There’s a lot at stake now. There is no going back after this — for any of us. It doesn’t have to be you .’

‘Yes it does, captain. Anyway, what do I have to go back to?’ said Alpheus, picking up a pillow. ‘A life where I end up like him, tossing fevered in a bed, with no arms to beg for help, no dignity, no freedom, no hope.’

King Julius rasped as the pillow was pushed down on his sweating face by his son, legs shaking at first, then thrashing with a last burst of whatever life, whatever will to live, still subsisted in him. His limbs convulsed and bucked as the contents of his bladder soaked across the plain bed cover. Then the monarch trembled into stillness.

Alpheus removed the pillow. The old man’s eyes were wide in shock, his sallow grey skin shining like he had just risen from a bath. ‘Be kind to Mother when you see her, Papa.’

Captain Flare put his hand on the prince’s shoulder. ‘Apart from anything else, Alpheus, the way he was suffering it was a mercy for him to move along the Circle.’

Alpheus swayed, dazed by the enormity of what he had just done. ‘If this goes wrong, captain, I ask just one thing. Don’t let them make me into him. Kill me first, kill me with your bare hands rather than let them put my arms on display outside the House of Guardians.’

Flare looked grim and said nothing.

‘The King is dead,’ laughed Bonefire. ‘Long live the pup.’

What is it?’ asked Molly, tapping the thick glass of the containment vessel. ‘It looks like a ball of rock.’

‘Here it is a ball of rock,’ replied Coppertracks, turning across the laboratory at the top of Tock House, his drone bodies moving out of the way in a perfectly synchronized ballet between the machines, tables and instruments crowding the space.

‘Ah, Coppertracks, do not make light of that cursed stuff and the problems it caused us — the deaths on the island,’ pleaded the commodore.

‘Dear mammal, master your fears. It has been inert for all the years since we left the Isla Needless.’

‘The rock was anything but inert then,’ said Nickleby, his face appearing distorted on the other side of the glass. ‘There were creatures made out of this material, Molly, things that attacked out of the stone and rocks. Half the boat’s crew had disappeared from our camp by the time we worked out what was stalking us.’

‘My poor plucky jacks,’ said Commodore Black. ‘Billy Topknot, Sally Gold, old Haggside Peter — there was never a finer group of tars to draw tanked air beneath the waves. I dug their graves with my own thin hungry fingers, lass. I threw the dirt of that terrible place over their cold dead faces.’

Molly stared closer. The black rock glistened under the gas light of the clock house chamber, little shards of silver and veins of metal visible through the containment glass. ‘A curious souvenir to keep.’

‘The miracle of life, Molly softbody,’ said Coppertracks, passing a tray of crystals to one of his drones. ‘Have you never wondered at how some objects in our universe possess a vital spark that makes them able to walk, think, feel. Comprehend and ponder their own place in the scheme of things — while others — even complex systems such as the weather or this rock here as it stands at the moment — do not.’

‘Nothing to do with your little contraption outside, then, Aliquot Coppertracks?’ said Nickleby.

Molly glanced to where the pensman was pointing, somewhere in the grounds of Tock House, beyond the orchard and the topiary garden, but she could see nothing there.

‘My scheme continues,’ said Coppertracks. Then to Molly, ‘Vibrations across the earthflow, my young softbody friend. We are not the only celestial body to orbit the sun. I believe there might be existences similar to our own on one or more of those bodies waiting to communicate with kindred intellects.’