Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air

‘We can breach their walls at night,’ said Steamswipe. ‘Stealth will serve us well.’

Harry looked thoughtful. ‘Yes, you see as well at night as we do in the day, don’t you? It may yet come to that, but if there’s no one I can trust in Shadowclock, I can think of at least one that I can’t.’

‘That is the level of your strategic thinking?’ asked Steamswipe.

Harry finished concealing the knight’s war arm. ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. I think it’s time to send a message to the Circle and pray for assistance.’

‘A friend you can’t trust, Harry?’

‘The bonds of friendship dwindle with age, Oliver. But a little blackmail lasts forever.’

Oliver looked at the coal dust on his clothes. The caravan of traders they had joined to sneak out of the Steammen Free State might have gone their own way, but the dust from the dirty mules still clung to his breeches. If he had gone home to Seventy Star Hall looking like this his uncle would have set Damson Griggs on him with a scrubbing brush.

‘Your secret police, the cloud-hidden, they will be watching for us?’ asked Steamswipe.

‘Perhaps,’ said Harry. ‘But they have to sight us before they can follow us. The Court of the Air might have been compromised, but not everyone up there is bent — I doubt if there’s a watch on Shadowclock. Whoever is behind this is killing people who poke their noses into the celgas mines. They’re not going to want to draw attention to the city with a full-scale quarter and sweep of the area running day and night for us.’

‘Conceal me in the panniers,’ said Lord Wireburn. Oliver realized the holy weapon was speaking to him. It took all his strength to heft the thing off the straw and into one of the bags on the side of the steamman. When Steamswipe lifted the weapon it appeared as light as the boatman’s gun that Mother Loade had given him.

‘You are a strange excuse for a squire,’ said Steamswipe.

‘You don’t look much like old Rustpivot back at Hundred Locks either,’ said Oliver. ‘Panniers or no. Harry, what about the county constabulary here — are they going to be looking for us?’

‘Lightshire is a long way from here, Oliver. Our details will be in the town garrison for certain, but you aren’t going to find Ham Yard blood machines at the toll cottages this far south. We’ll travel by day from now on, like the respectable Jackelians we are. There’s a full moon tonight; too many villages and farms around here for us to be sneaking around — I don’t want some farmer taking pot shots at us for poaching or sheep rustling.’

Stave proved correct in his decision to switch to travelling by daylight. Every morning the roads they took filled with people. Drovers herding hundreds of geese to market, young dogs bounding around the honking birds to keep them off the meadows and on the road. Independent traders, carts filled with barrels of supplies and market goods rattled past. Sometimes the three of them stopped and rested in red barn-sized structures by the side of the road, the Lissacks Commons, named after the Guardian who had raised the bill in the house that paid for their construction. Oliver would listen to the hoots of owls and drift into a deep sleep while Harry traded ghost stories with the other travellers and merchants staying in the free accommodation.

The evenings were becoming balmy as high summer arrived, and for a while the cares and worries lifted from Oliver’s shoulders. Even Steamswipe seemed to draw barely a second glance as they passed through the rutted tracks of the county’s hamlets. Villagers in the gardens seemed more concerned about when the next mail coach would arrive, and Oliver became tired of telling them when the last time was that the cheap ha’penny post had passed him. The mail coaches often overtook them — their drivers showed no inclination to spare the whip on their poor horses. They raced against each other as they had always done, to beat the best times for the stage. It was doubtful if anyone else in Jackals cared. Penny post went by aerostat and urgent letters — where money was no object — could be entrusted to a crystalgrid station.

Occasionally they would be resting underneath the foliage of a shady ash tree when the shadow of an aerostat would pass over them, one of the massive warships heading south to Shadowclock. Harry was curious about the frequency of the airships travelling overhead, until he found the reason from a horseman resting his stallion at one of the Lissacks. The high fleet of war was confined to port after some trouble in the capital. Only the merchant marine was running in and out of the aerostat fields now. This news seemed to trouble Harry although he would not — or could not — say why.

It was in the lee of one of the coaching inns marking the route that they came across a party of rovies with the same wild style as the gypsy caravans that descended on Hundred Locks for the Midwinter Festival. Their horses were sixers from the colonies, the extra pair of legs useful for hauling the double-storey house wagons of the nomadic travellers. Oliver stared up at the house wagons; they were works of art, built like colourful wooden galleons of the land. Many of the rovie clans had fled to Jackals from the plains to the east of Quatershift during the dying days of the revolution. The state’s new masters had targeted the free-spirited people as uncommunityist, selfishly unproductive. Punishment began with the accused being exiled to an organized community — and usually ended when they were finally fed into a Gideon’s collar.

Harry decided the gypsies would make excellent cover to travel the remaining miles to Shadowclock and quickly set about befriending their headman at one of the trestles behind the inn. They both laughed and sang drinking songs that sounded lewd even in the incomprehensible tongue the two men were using — possibly a shiftie dialect. A deal was struck and Oliver and Steamswipe found themselves attached to one of the house-boxes. Between the taciturn steamman warrior and the jabbering travellers with their mangled Jackelian, Oliver found himself wishing he were riding up front with Harry. At least his stories made sense. The family chief of Oliver’s wagon had a near neckless head the shape of an upside-down potato and a permanently slumped stance. When he was not drunk and insanely happy, he was scowling and scratching at his silver hair while his horses plodded along at an unbroken pace.

Still, the food was good: soft baked hams in a peppery breadcrumb crust washed down with sloe berry wine. It was a surreal experience, swaying as he rested on the back step of the caravan, listening to the sounds of the wheels crunch over the husks and shells blown in from the grain fields. Bathing in the warm sunlight while somewhere out there in Jackals the members of a lethal conspiracy were plotting his demise. This is what it must have been like for the other children at Hundred Locks — unrestricted by a Department of Feymist registration order — packed off during the teachers’ rest weeks to stay with relatives in far-off corners of Jackals. Collecting fallen birch wood for the hearth with their cousins, lying down in glades and watching the clouds pull past overhead.

Every now and then another train of horses would overtake Oliver’s caravan in the line. He had been surprised to see that one of the caravans was owned by a steamman, the metal creature’s limbs tied with ribbons of gaudy fabric as if he had been decorated for a festival. He spoke no language apart from Quatershiftian, and the only comment Oliver could elicit from Steamswipe was that his fellow steamman was defective in his cognitive functions.

While the taciturn steamman made for an unloquacious travelling companion, his attitude to Oliver had mellowed enough that he was allowed — perhaps even required — to polish the holy relic from the chamber of arms every evening. What sort of weapon Lord Wireburn was, he was still unsure of. Oliver faintly recalled reading one of his uncle’s classic texts on warfare, filled with illustrations of regimental squares and inked arrows of manoeuvre. Steammen were meant to favour air pistols that could be connected to their own boilers for pressurisation. Lord Wireburn did not seem to be one of those. Its black shell-like metal sweated a strange dark oil which needed to be wiped clean every day. Oliver had to wash the rags he used for the job after each hour spent cleaning the holy device.