Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air

Moaning with the pain of the effort, Oliver pulled out the knife from his boot and tried to rise; but a spiked boot kicked it from his hand before he could activate the witch-blade — a third incremental tracking backwards towards the rope. The warrior’s hand reached out and a finger wagged slowly backwards and forwards. ‹Naughty, naughty.›

In his other hand the incremental held a rifle with a barrel as long as a lance, covering Oliver with its muzzle. They were leaving him behind. But then what did they care about a young registered man ripped from his home and tossed into their savage world? Just one more body for the crushers’ justice and the doomsman’s gallows. Oliver laughed. If he lived through the coming cataclysm, they would care enough. He would make them. The warrior stopped, briefly surprised by the eerie sound of mirth. Then he was at the rope ladder and hauling himself up after the other two incrementals. The ladder began to lift out of sight.

Oliver cursed and retrieved his knife. Bursting through the smoke, Steamswipe came galloping into view, scanned Oliver and glanced up to the occluded sky. He pointed Lord Wireburn up at a firmament hidden by the dark murk of battle. ‘It is an aerosphere,’ said the holy weapon. ‘I have its signature sighted. Forty feet above us.’

‘Can you bring it down?’ Oliver coughed, getting to his feet.

‘I am an annihilator, little softbody, not a birding rifle from a Jackelian gunsmith,’ said Lord Wireburn. ‘I can destroy it, or I can let it go. It is at seventy feet now.’

‘Let it go. Bloody Circle!’

Harry was gone. They would break his mind and then whatever was left of his body would be tossed into a holding cell, to rot next door to all of the other undesirables who had crossed the Court. His friend, his guide had vanished — all that was left was the terrible hunger and evil that had found Oliver in Hundred Locks and stalked him across the face of Jackals. His hope had gone, but there was the wickedness. He could still feel that.

‘Reinforcements are coming out of the mine,’ said Oliver.

Steamswipe scooped him up with his blood-slicked hammer and his manipulator arm, dropping him onto his back. Across the sundered ground a line of figures broke through the smoke and the burning gorse, black leather cloaks rising in the heat of the fire. The Special Guard and a handful of the Whisperer-like feybreed. As soon as they caught sight of Oliver, the Whisperer-things struck out at his mind, pulses of hateful energy darting at his mentality. At the same time a Special Guardsman raised his arm, pouring cerulean flames at Oliver and his steamman steed. Blue flame licked off an invisible dome surrounding them while Oliver caught the biting darts of the mind assault and twisted them back towards their owners, the Whisperer-things tumbling screaming onto the ground.

‘A worldsinger,’ cried one of the guardsmen.

‘No,’ said Captain Flare, emerging from the line. ‘He is one of us. Can’t you feel his power? He is a brother of the mist.’

Steamswipe surged forward, Lord Wireburn spitting fluidic sun-spheres at the line. Oliver barely held onto the stampeding knight. ‘Let me make you brothers to the worms, you damn murdering softbodies. Steelbhalah-Waldo! Steelbhalah-Waldo!’

Oliver scarcely kept up with the scattering line — some speeded up into witch-time blurs, others turned invisible or swelled up into iron-solid mountains of flesh. Several of Lord Wireburn’s sun spheres disappeared into swirling rips in the air, others splattered against a wall of circular orange shields which had been conjured in front of the Special Guardsmen. Steamswipe rode down a guardswoman, his hammer upper-cutting another in the chest, lifting the guard high into the air. The steamman had gone into a berserker frenzy; Oliver could feel the purity of his rage, the righteousness of his fury. Attacks lashed out from all four sides but Oliver turned them back, diverted them, slapped each of them down. Fire, ice, darts of porcupine spine, the claw-like attempts to batter inside his mind. Faster and faster they struck.

Oliver caught the presence of the two Grimhope outlaws behind them, crossbows loaded with a weight of bolas. A pistol bucked in Oliver’s hand and the ball caught an outlaw in his gut. His compatriot fired and the rotating bolas caught Steamswipe’s hind legs, snarling the knight. As the steamman tripped Oliver flew off with all the momentum of the stalled dash. More Grimhopers rushed him from the rear, fey energies licking out from the front. Too close to reload

Oliver pulled out his knife and activated it with a twist, the hilt squirming in his hand as it reacted to its owner’s presence. This blade had not been forged by the race of man. It was alive; it recognized the bloodline of Phileas Brooks.

‘Sword,’ said Oliver and the blade flowed upwards, a hilt curving out from the handle.

He moved through the charge of Grimhope outlaws and they kept running even as their chests separated from their legs in a rain of severed limbs while Oliver swept the witch-blade around in a fencer’s dance — the echo of earlier selves following him like a shadow, the ghost of his father among them. A howl of steam sounded behind him and Oliver dropped to one knee, skewering a brute with a trident. Captain Flare was riding Steamswipe’s back, one fist pummelling the knight’s boiler, the other pinning Lord Wireburn. His friend’s stacks were mewling as the source of his steamman strength leaked away. Steamswipe’s manipulator arms were twisted back; trying to unseat the Captain of the Special Guard and bring him within range of his hammer arm.

Oliver stepped forward to help Steamswipe but a figure shivered into life in front of him — an old woman in a guardsman’s cloak — either she had been invisible or she could throw her body across distances. She struck out and Oliver barely avoided her kick. Disconcerting. Like having to fight old Damson Griggs. His witch-blade flicked out to pierce her torc-bound throat, following its own enchanted curve of raw ruthlessness, but it seethed against a transparent shield of fire that sparked as the blade glanced off it. Oliver danced back, avoiding the discus of energy she was manifesting. He tried to neutralise the shield, but her fey power snaked out beneath his perception.

‘Raw power isn’t enough, boy,’ she said, circling him. ‘You need discipline, focus.’

His ears were still ringing from the explosions; her voice sounded like it was being carried through water. ‘Let’s see if it isn’t.’ His witch-blade ached in his grip, eager to sink itself through her chest. His pistols sung to be reloaded, a dozen past lives making him dizzy, detailing the hundred ways he could dispatch the old woman.

She sliced a clawed hand at Oliver and he stepped into her grasp, feeling the crackle of her skin, the energy of her fey-twisted soul — amplifying it, feeding it — making the fields glowing around her hands ignite as bright as one of Lord Wireburn’s sunbursts. Screaming, she fell back, her two hands ablaze. There was little evil in her soul, only determination and loyalty to her compatriots — an age served in the guard. He ignored the witch-blade’s call to carve her head off its neck and turned towards Steamswipe.

Captain Flare had battered the knight into semi-consciousness. Steamswipe’s boiler was twisted and deformed and venting steam from a dozen tears, the light of his vision plate a faint red smear behind his visor. Wrathful, Oliver bounded forward, his witch-blade looping out, boiling to sever one of those perfectly muscled arms from the captain’s trunk. But the witch-knife flexed off the Special Guardsman’s arm, its blade quivering in agony. After centuries of use it had finally sliced into something dense enough to resist its passage.