Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air

A crackling sound caught Oliver’s attention. On the other side of a canopy of oak leaves a fire burned in the open. The travellers had witches with them, beautiful wild women who could twist the flames from the camp fires into dancing comet streamers and wrap the fire around themselves like silk as they leapt lightly around the grass, unhurried by gravity’s touch. Their faces were so perfect, their bodies so lithe, that just seeing them was enough to make a heart ache. Harry had already warned him off the rovie women — suggesting that any liaison would likely end in him being stuck with a jealous lover’s blade or forced into a hasty traveller’s wedding. Oliver doubted if he would have the courage to approach them anyway. The few times that he had tried to show interest in girls at Hundred Locks they had laughed at him, looks of fear and pity curiously intermingled on their faces. The cries of ‘fey-boy, fey-boy’ from the gangs of his peers when he stumbled across them in the town still stung in his memory, along with the tittering half-whispered conversations when he passed girls of his age. He polished the relic harder. That would not be happening again in the near future. Never again.

Under the shade of the tree, Steamswipe cut the evening air with his martial forms, sweeping and ducking in a slow dance as the sky turned red with sunset.

Oliver sighed. ‘Why did you come with us, knight?’

Oliver had meant the question to be rhetorical, and was surprised when the voicebox in Lord Wireburn’s barrel vibrated with an answer. ‘Because it was necessary.’

Oliver reached for a clean rag. ‘You seemed to be one of the few to think so. His own commander wanted him left buried underneath Mechancia.’

‘Master Saw has not known fear, he does not understand the knight’s crime.’

‘Steamswipe has known fear?’

‘Steamswipe has faced that which no other steamman dares. In the rotting heart of Liongeli there are a people related to our race — the siltempters. They feed on the life force from our soul boards, they would drink our oil, rip the crystal components from our chest assemblies to wear as necklaces for their perverted rites and not think it too much. Are my barrel manifolds warm?’

‘They cool as I wipe this black liquid off,’ said Oliver.

‘Steamswipe has been to the heart of darkness and faced that which no mind should see without being bent out of shape for eternity. Master Saw has not known fear, but Master Saw has only faced craynarbian tribesmen and Quatershiftian regiments on the border of the Free State. He does not know . That is why I chose the knight.’

‘If you understand that,’ said Oliver, ‘then you also know fear?’

‘I understand.’

Oliver looked at the ugly dark weapon cradled on his lap, heavy enough to be uncomfortable even horizontal. ‘What in the name of the Circle do you fear, Lord Wireburn?’

‘I fear that which I must do, young softbody. And I fear that one day I will come to enjoy it.’

What has your analyser uncovered, Aliquot?’ asked Nickleby.

‘Is it my parents?’ said Molly. ‘Have you discovered their identity?’

‘I am afraid no blood machine is sophisticated enough to do that,’ said Coppertracks. ‘Although theoretically speaking, with some modifications I am sure I might … but I digress. You may see for yourself, Molly softbody. Press your eyes up to the magnification glass.’

Molly placed her face inside the rubber hood on the front of the machine, cold glass staring down onto a pink river filled with the flow of creatures — fragile jelly-like things moving in liquid. ‘This is my blood?’

‘It is,’ said Coppertracks. ‘The gas compression acts as a powerful lens, magnifying the view of your system juices a thousand fold. What you see under the glass are the animalcules that constitute your biological cooperative.’

‘It looks — odd. Like a river filled with fish and eels.’

‘Filled with other things, young softbody. Filled with answers. Look!’ Coppertracks turned up the magnification, the machine hissing as the gas cylinders intensified their internal pressure. ‘Do you see the smaller organisms in your system juices?’

‘What can you see, lass?’ Commodore Black moved closer. ‘Through that infernal periscope of Aliquot’s?’

‘Tiny things — with cogs turning, moving through my blood, like the screws on a boat. That’s not normal, is it?’ A terrible feeling of apprehension seized Molly. Had she been poisoned, was she dying?

Coppertracks held up a wad of tape from the analysing machine. ‘Your people have a name for it, young softbody. Popham’s Disease. If you needed a transfusion of system juices during a medical operation you would die in agony unless the donor of the juices also suffered from Popham’s Disease. This is the missing link, the thing that you share with all the other victims of the Pitt Hill Slayer. This disease was not to be found on your records in Greenhall’s transaction engine rooms because the information entity that uncovered your details erased that data. I warrant that every name on the list of victims had the same disease.’

‘Why would a rare blood type make Molly a target for murder?’ said Nickleby. ‘Is there someone important who is ill with the disease — and the slayer wants to wipe out all sources of donor blood?’

‘A logical reason if the murderer could not directly make their intended victim deactivate,’ said Coppertracks. ‘But in this case I think not.’

One of the slipthinker’s mu-bodies returned to the clock chamber bearing a leather tome, its cover cracked and brown with age. Coppertracks took the book and rested it carefully on a workbench. He opened it wide and Molly saw that the pages were illuminated in metallic ink — still shining despite the crinkled age of the paper. She had never seen such beautiful illustrations before, delicately rendered raised metal images surrounded by black calligraphy in a language she did not recognize. It made the linework pictures of Jackals’ news sheets and penny dreadfuls look like bored scribbling dashed out by amateurs. Something told her that whoever had painstakingly created page after page of this work — surely a life’s labour — had not belonged to the race of man.

One of Coppertracks’ iron fingers moved over the page and Molly saw what it was he wanted her to see — a rainbow block of what she had first taken for abstract border-work around the edges of the page. The drawings were clusters of the same tiny creatures Coppertracks had pointed out swimming through the internal rivers of her body. Arrows from the script connected to the illustrations, commentary on the creatures no doubt.

‘Do you see, Molly softbody? Your council of surgeons classifies Popham’s Disease as a disorder of your system juices, but it is not. It is a gift!’

‘A gift that would let her die under a sawbones’s scalpel,’ said the commodore. ‘Blessed gifts like that you can keep to yourself.’

Molly calmed the commodore. ‘What do you mean a gift?’

‘Do you not feel an affinity for mechomancy, Molly soft-body? In the engine rooms at Greenhall you divined the purpose of the Radnedge Rotator just by looking at it. Slowcogs and Silver Onestack instinctively followed you through the caverns of the outlaw realm, Redrust the controller gave his life to protect your own after a single reading of the Gear-gi-ju cogs.’

Molly remembered her fingers flickering over Onestack’s vision crystals, restoring his sight to colour. ‘I can’t deny I feel a calling towards your people, a talent for fixing machines — but it’s a knack, I’ve always had it.’

‘You have always had it because you have one foot in the world of fastbloods and one foot in the race of steammen, young softbody. Those creatures in your blood are of my people. They are machine life. They are of the metal.’