Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air

They rolled down the slope towards the city, Steamswipe’s red visor gleaming as he scanned the substantial walls for sentries. Counting the towers visible on the highest of the hills, the knight noted every bloated warship docked inside the city, aerostats drifting in and out of view as clouds of smoke from the mines wafted in the still summer air.

Towards the bottom of the slope the reverend’s cart rolled past the gates of a graveyard and into a field of head stones, well tended but stained black by their proximity to the city. Two bare-chested graspers with rippling muscles stopped digging a fresh hole to wave at the churchman, then recommenced their labours.

‘I wasn’t too sure if we were going to find you filling one of your own plots,’ said Harry.

‘The Circle still has a little work left for me to do here,’ said the reverend, ‘before the wheel turns for me.’

Tying the cart up in the shadow of a temple the reverend unlocked a door and led them into a cool chamber, the centre of the room filled with a stone sarcophagus, a couple carved out of stone lying serenely in the shadows. Reaching down to the platform of the sarcophagus, the reverend grasped the infinity symbol carved into the marble and twisted it, then stepped aside as the sarcophagus crunched back on rollers.

He waved them down the hole that had been uncovered, yellow lamplight flickering below. They climbed down a ladder and Oliver found himself face to face with more graspers, whiskers twitching as they unpacked the contents of a coffin into the underground passage. Not a cadaver, but bottles of jinn, unlabelled and full of the pink liquid.

Harry scooped one of the bottles up and cracked it open against the wall, emptying it down his throat in one easy movement. ‘And here’s me thinking the governor was running a dry city.’

The reverend took the bottle off Harry. ‘He will be again if you keep consuming the victuals.’

Following the slope of the tunnel for a couple of minutes, their passage widened into a series of cave-like catacombs and Steamswipe unhunched his back, the low hiss of his boiler the only sound in the cavern. Spared the soot of the engines above ground, the cave walls gleamed white as the churchman’s torch passed them.

Harry tapped a pile of barrels as they navigated through the cave tunnels. ‘All this money — one day I’ll visit and you’ll have disappeared. Where’s the reverend, I’ll ask? Oh, they’ll say, he’s retired to the colonies. Left a legacy by a nephew. Bought a plantation he did.’

The reverend snorted. ‘You know where the money goes, Harold. If you didn’t, you’d still be waiting back in Rattle. Not all our coffins are full of contraband. By the Circle, I wish they were.’

The reverend led them through the cold twisting tunnels of the catacombs, passing as many chambers filled with moon-raker’s produce as littered with bones — a smuggler’s fortune hidden beneath the surface of Shadowclock. The reverend seemed to have moved from preaching against sin to controlling it inside the city. His Circlist position was the perfect cover. Oliver wondered if the vicar back in Hundred Locks had been helping the moonrakers land illegal cargoes in the bay of the dike too. Perhaps the whole Circlist church in Jackals was a front for the flash mob, the crime barons of Middlesteel all surreptitiously sitting as bishops and prelates.

Surfacing in the basement level of a church, Oliver stepped out of a hidden door in the wall, into a room piled with old pews and a crowd of broken oak-carved gargoyles.

‘You can stay in the hospice rooms at the back,’ said the preacher to Harry. ‘They’re not fancy, but I figure for a queer-looking party like yours, it’s better than the questions you would get trying to room at an inn or boarding house.’

The reverend went to leave but Harry stopped him. ‘There’s someone we need to meet, reverend.’ He unfolded a scrap of paper and showed the churchman the scar markings Oliver had drawn back on Harry’s narrowboat. ‘He’ll have a high position in the grasper warren and mining combination. A few years on him.’

The reverend took a seat on an old stone chair from the high Circlist days, thinking. He looked like a monarch from the ancient age of Jackals, a fissured old prophet sitting in judgement. ‘You’ve come a long way for nothing, Harold. I know the man with these warren scars. He’s dead. I buried him myself.’

‘Dead how, old man?’

‘Officially it was a cave-in. Unofficially, well, I’ve seen my share of rock wounds and what was left of him to bury didn’t have them. I would say someone dropped your miner down a very long mineshaft. I didn’t hold an open-coffin wake if you know what I mean.’

‘He was a combination man,’ said Harry. ‘High warren! Back when I was last here there would have a been a withdrawal of labour until the crushers found a killer.’

‘Yes there would,’ said the reverend. ‘Five years ago. But things have changed in Shadowclock. There have been an awful lot of cave-ins and gas flares under the three hills — accidents that always seem to kill key members of the brotherhood of gas miners.’

‘The combination’s done nothing? You’ve done nothing?’

‘I’m a tired old man, Harold. On a good day I can just about climb into my cart myself and ride the parish. And the combination’s been broken as long as I have.’

‘The governor couldn’t break an egg in the morning without his valet. What in the Circle’s name has happened here while I’ve been gone?’

‘The combination was broken from the inside out, Harold. Not from the hill, although I’m sure the governor is in on all the merry japes that are being played here. Either that or he is so scared he’s looking the other way. The man you were looking for has a son. I’ll ask him to come over tomorrow. You can ask him your questions.’

‘What does Anna think of all this?’ asked Harry.

‘She moved along the Circle a couple of years ago,’ said the reverend. ‘Old age. I buried her out back myself. Elizabeth and the girls left soon after. They got tired of wiping dust from the mines off their dresses, got tired of the engine smoke, maybe they even got tired seeing how little difference I was making here.’

The reverend left to check on the rooms at the back of the church. Harry looked pale and wan. He had been expecting to meet someone different. The old man had changed, deflated.

‘The softbody priest,’ said Steamswipe. ‘You are threatening him with exposure of his smuggling activities?’

‘Don’t sound so disapproving,’ said Harry. ‘Sneaking stuff past city customs is the least of it. He was a wicked old fox in his day. Gave the wolftakers the run-around like nobody else in the Court’s history.’

‘How did a town vicar ever come to warrant the Court’s attention,’ said Oliver.

‘It wasn’t the churchman that caught our eye,’ said Harry. ‘It was someone else entirely. But I reckon that man’s dead now. Come on, let’s get our packs stowed.’

The reverend’s church was built into the narrow terraced streets. Oliver sat on a window seat, carefully cleaning the boatman’s gun the way Harry had showed him, with half an eye on the waking city outside. Three storeys below gas miners were changing shift, crowds of graspers wearing dirty gutta-percha capes and gas hoods trudging back home, elephantine breather filters swinging from their faces in a solemn pendulum sway. Normally the graspers would have been quite capable of mining without protection — their own warren cities in the downlands were testament to that. But exposure to celgas caused burns to even their tough hide, so they rode the steam lifts underground in their stifling suits and sweated their labours for Jackals’ most precious commodity.