Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air

Behind Molly, Coppertracks’ body tossed on top of his tracks, moaning as the pain of his warrior drone’s death overwhelmed him. Nickleby and the commodore emptied their rifles into the fray, but it was too late. Tock House’s steamman guardian lay deactivate in a pool of dark oil, his life force spilled in the warm summer night.

‘They’re withdrawing,’ shouted Molly. It was true, down below the toppers were disappearing back into the trees.

‘No, lass,’ said Commodore Black. ‘The black-hearted devils know we are on our last legs now. They’re regrouping.’

True to the submariner’s prediction the toppers came back out a few minutes later, odd guns that looked like broomsticks with kegs on their tips strapped to their bodies.

Molly stared. ‘What are those things?’

‘Get down Molly.’ Nickleby pushed her to the floor as one of the kegs fireworked off its broom and crashed through the shattered clockface. It was pierced with pepper-holes and spun across the floor, filling the chamber with smoke.

‘Aliquot,’ yelled Nickleby, ‘get the girl out of here.’

‘My vision glass is impaired,’ called the steamman. ‘Find my nearest mu-body.’

More of the wooden kegs clattered across the chamber, spinning as gas streamed out. Black was coughing an obscenity, but Molly could not even see him now in the smog. It smelt sickly sweet and stung at her eyes like vinegar — inhaling it was like trying to breathe cotton wool, her throat hacking as her lungs tried to separate air from the foul viscous cloud.

Crawling across the floor, breathing nails, she could not see Nickleby or any of her other friends — her tear-eyed vision was down to a couple of inches inside the mustard thick haze. An explosion shook the tower, followed by a clang as the metal shield door collapsed back with all the weight of a dying slipsharp. Molly’s shaking body was enveloped by darkness long before the first grappling hook slashed into the metal frame of the clock face.

‘What was in the blanket he gave you?’ asked Harry Stave.

‘I haven’t had the chance to look yet,’ said Oliver. ‘He said it was a gift. Something he didn’t get to use much anymore.’

‘He’d spend his time more profitably trying to find the miner we’re looking for,’ said Harry. ‘The old man said he knew the son — how hard can it be to track down a single grasper?’

The reverend appeared at the bottom of the stairs. ‘That depends on how hard the grasper in question is trying not to be found, Harold.’

‘Good to see your hearing isn’t going yet, old man.’

‘My sense of hospitality is wearing powerful thin though. So it’s lucky for both of us that your miner has just walked into the church. He’s waiting out the back with your steamman friend — but ’ware how you tread, this pilgrim is more than a little skittish.’

‘About time,’ said Harry.

‘Come on Harry, he’s just an old man,’ said Oliver. ‘I think he believes he’s going to move along the Circle soon.’

‘He might be right,’ said Harry. ‘One way or another.’

In the church hospice the grasper stood nervously, his boots twitching on the floor, although he became slightly calmer when he saw the reverend return.

‘This is Mabvoy,’ said the reverend. ‘His father was the combination man you described.’

‘Sit down my friend,’ said Harry. ‘We’re on the same side. The people who murdered your father have been doing their best to kill us off, too.’

‘Well pardon me if I don’t find that reassuring,’ said the grasper. ‘I only came here because with the reverend’s friends asking around town after me, it was only going to be a matter of time before word got back to them that you were looking for me. After that, I’d be as dead as my father … and so would you.’

‘Your father came to visit us in Hundred Locks,’ said Oliver.

‘You?’ The grasper looked at Oliver as if he was seeing him in the room for the first time.

‘My uncle,’ said Oliver. ‘He came to visit my Uncle Titus.’

‘Ah. Yes, he went north a couple of times — said he was telling someone about the problems at the mines. I thought it might be a Greenhall man.’

‘He didn’t want to tell the authorities here?’ asked Harry.

‘There’s them that did,’ said the grasper. ‘And them that did weren’t seen again. Nothing happens at Shadowclock without a nod from the governor. Everyone knows that. You might as well complain to the highwaymen about the mail coach being robbed. One of the traders that came here told my father that he knew someone who could sort the problems out. It cost him his life.’

‘It cost my uncle his life, too,’ said Oliver. ‘Your killers turned up at Seventy Star Hall and finished us all off. It wasn’t much of an existence, but it was mine.’

‘Sorry for your family,’ said the grasper. He sounded like he meant it.

Harry checked the window. Steamswipe was standing sentry at the wall, his vision plate tracking the workers and families walking up and down the street. Watching for people who might be loitering, repeating their route. Lord Wireburn hung on a clip on his flank, a brooding black presence waiting for murder.

‘Tell me about the problems,’ said Harry.

The grasper laughed, but there was no humour in it. ‘You got all day? It started two or three years ago. There was a wave of young blood coming up through the mining combination. Radicals. Said we were getting the shaft, not the silver mine from the masters. Wanted to demand more money — all the usual things.’

‘Your father was high in the warren.’

‘He was on the combination committee,’ said the grasper. ‘They opposed the radicals at first — there was no respect for the elders being shown — that’s not the way we do things. But then the radicals bypassed the committee and went direct to the governor, demanded the reforms — and he gave in. Just like that. No withdrawal of labour, no work to rule. He just said yes, as meek as you please.’

Stave made a sound at the back of his throat. Disbelief, but it came out as half a growl.

‘I see you know how it works,’ said the grasper. ‘There’s not a penny we earn that hasn’t been sweated and fought out of the masters’ pockets. There’s not a public bath in Shadowclock that hasn’t been built on the back of an unlawful public assembly and disorder. But they just ask and the governor gives the radicals it all.’

‘That must have caused quite a stir,’ said Harry.

‘It finished the old committee,’ said the grasper. ‘After that there was no stopping the radicals. They took over the combination. Strutted around the city like the lords of the town.’

‘So how come I don’t see a sea of smiling faces coming off each shift down in the streets?’ asked Harry.

‘Oh, we still get the money,’ said the grasper. ‘But we get a lot more than that too. Miners started disappearing. Just a few at first, but the ones who vanished were the master guildsmen. Tunnellers, frame layers, engineers. The best the city had. Without them looking after things the gas mines got unsafe powerful fast.’ The grasper pulled his shirt open, showing them the burns across his leathery fur. ‘Gas flare — killed four of my team. In the old days that kind of seepage would have been detected, sealed and drained. Now, there’s barely a worker down the tunnels who knows one end of a cavity-cutter tube from another. The new committee abolished the apprenticeship system — said it encouraged inequitable caste distinctions — now there’s so many workers vanished from the city that they’re throwing pups down the pits.’

‘But that’s got to have hit your production quotas,’ said Harry. ‘The House of Guardians may not care about rock falls in the tunnels, but by the Circle, they do care about the supply of celgas.’