Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air

Somewhere out there, obscured by the engine smoke and rock dust of Shadowclock, were the answers. The answers to why his family lay dead in Hundred Locks. The answers to why his name now adorned wanted posters on constables’ walls for murders he had not committed. The answers to why momentous events now seemed to swing around the orbit of his small life like drunken dancers around a festival pole.

‘You don’t look like you’re used to doing that, boy.’ It was the reverend. For all his years he moved with the silence of a cat. There was something else Oliver found disconcerting. The way the old man’s shadow moved sometimes — faster than his age, larger than his bulk. Like it belonged to someone else. ‘In fact, you don’t look any more comfortable than when you’re wiping the gunk off that talking obscenity your steamman friend keeps rolled away.’

Oliver placed a gleaming barrel down on the cloth. ‘I’ve only shot it the once — and if I hit what I was aiming at it was an accident.’

‘That I figured. How old are you, son? You look like you should just be finishing off your schooling, not trailing behind a poacher-turned-gamekeeper like Harold Stave.’

Oliver scratched a pattern in the soot on the window. ‘I was tossed out of school when they put me on the county registration book.’

‘Ah,’ said the reverend. ‘A bit of wild blood running through the veins, eh? That’s too bad. We don’t get the mist much in this part of the world. Don’t mix well with the earthflow streams and the gas we’re sitting on, I reckon. You’ll die of black lung and tunnel rot before you choke on a feymist here at Shadowclock.’

‘Is that why you stay here?’ said Oliver.

‘I go where I’m needed, pilgrim,’ said the reverend. ‘I’m a lifetime too old to fear the mist now, boy. Too old to survive the changes if it got me. Besides, a man has to die of something.’

‘You’re needed to supply jinn to the miners?’

‘That’s the mercenary streak you get hanging around Harold Stave speaking, boy,’ said the reverend. ‘There’s more than one sort of crime. As a for instance, Shadowclock doesn’t have a board of the poor to help the families here when they fall on hard times. The city’s a mining town — if you’re not working the governor doesn’t want you taking up valuable space that could be filled by someone more able. This is a bad place to get lame, injured or sick in.’

‘You sound like a Carlist,’ said Oliver.

‘That’s been noted before,’ said the reverend. ‘But when you come down to it, there’s not much that was written in Community and the Commons that wasn’t spoken first by one prophet or another in the good book. People are all people have got, boy. We need to look out for each other.’

The truth of what the reverend was doing suddenly settled on Oliver. ‘That’s why you’re running this place like the flash mob! You use the money to help the families that would have gone to the poor board.’

‘Keep your voice down, son. The state wouldn’t care for it if they knew I had a parallel system of taxation running underneath their noses.’

‘And Harry found out about it.’

‘That’s a polite way of asking is that what he’s got over me,’ said the reverend. ‘If it was, it would be the best of it. His people might care about the security of this place, but they don’t give a damn about skimming the froth off the customs gate. Their attitude to it is the same as mine — people have been drinking and stuffing their pipes for as long as there’s been history — someone’s going to do it. My way there’s fewer hungry children keeping their parents awake at night crying because the stew pot was more water than it was gravy.’

‘You sound tired,’ said Oliver.

‘By damn I am tired, pilgrim. Life at my age is like serving in a war. Everything you ever loved, everyone you knew, has been cut down by the years. I’ve outlived them all; my wife, my friends, most of my damn enemies too. All I have left is my anger at the foolishness of the world. The unnecessary cruelties, the pomposity and vanity of people who should know better. Most of the time I just want to shake some sense into the world.’

Oliver did not know what to say. Listening to the old man was like hearing the thunder roll at the end of a storm. Their places in the world separated by the gulf of a lifetime. Something about the reverend made him uneasy, but he wasn’t sure if it was a hidden darkness in the man or a premonition that he might be seeing echoes of how he would end up seventy years hence.

From down the stairs Oliver heard Steamswipe calling his name. ‘I’d better go.’

‘Better had, boy.’

When Oliver had gone the reverend checked the stairs then shut the door to the room. He went to the window seat where Oliver had been resting and lifted up the cover. From underneath a jumble of blankets the reverend pulled out a wooden box. Settling his bones into a chair he balanced the box on his legs and toyed with the clasp. What had made him think of it now? He hadn’t thought of the box for months, let alone looked at it. Too much talk of the past. No fool like an old fool. Against his better nature he lifted the lid and the light of the box’s contents illuminated the crevices of his face. He sighed and put the box away. Then, resting back in the chair, he fell asleep.

It was a light slumber, the slumber of age and weariness. As a child the reverend had laughed when his own grandfather had fallen asleep during the day. It had seemed comical. Now he did the same four or five times a day. His dreams had become pedestrian since Anna had moved along the Circle: he was busying about the church, checking the cushions were still underneath the pews. Then the thing walked in from the street. Surely nothing could have been so badly injured in a tunnel gas flare and lived? It was a gargoyle given flesh.

‘By damn,’ said the reverend.

‘Not quite,’ said the Whisperer. ‘Although one of us might be damned.’

‘What in the name of the Circle are you, my friend?’

‘You can think of me as your conscience,’ hissed the Whisperer.

‘My conscience sure got mean since I last used it.’

‘No false modesty now,’ said the Whisperer, ‘your conscience gets out more than I do. All those secret payments to the widows and the children, the food for the miners with limbs as mangled as mine.’

The dream seemed more vivid than usual. The reverend looked around the church with unnatural clarity. ‘My conscience seems very well informed today, sir.’

‘I like your mind, old man. It’s as still as that graveyard you tend, and has as many secret tunnels buried away beneath it.’

‘We all have secrets,’ said the reverend, ‘and a tale to tell. Behind that flesh of yours, for instance.’

‘Ah, but my story is a mere abbreviation in comparison to yours, old man,’ said the Whisperer. ‘What’s to tell? A feymist rising and a sleeping child in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

‘The lives of half the Special Guard began that way.’

‘You should take a tour of Hawklam Asylum some time, old man. Poke a stick between the bars of the low-risk feybreed with all the other curious ladies and gentleman of Middlesteel. You would see how most of our stories end up.’

‘So you are connected to the boy.’

‘So I am,’ said the Whisperer. ‘I’ve been having a little trouble getting into Oliver’s dreams of late. His body’s defences seem to be reacting to me as a threat after I had to pour a little unpleasant fey medicine down his throat.’

‘Lucky him.’

‘Don’t be like that, old man. I’m only trying to steer him in the right direction.’

‘Yes, but right for who?’ said the reverend.