Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air

Flare closed on him. ‘How did the fey-finders miss you, boy? You should have joined the guard years ago.’

Oliver rolled past his grip and thrust the tip of the witch-blade into his knee, the blade distorting and retracting back into its knife-size in protest. ‘I prefer my freedom.’

Flare slapped the blade out of his hand, turning to land a punch on Oliver’s face. ‘Then we have something in common, mist-brother.’

Oliver reached out and dampened the fey energies in the pile-driving jab. But even as a mortal the captain’s flesh had been built up by years in the muscle-pits — it was not just for impressing Jackals’ citizenry when he escorted the monarch. Oliver fell back reeling. Another Special Guardsman was behind him and Oliver drained the blue fire that erupted towards his back, sinking it into a fold in the air. Then another guardsman appeared through the carnage wrought by the aerosphere, then a third and a fourth. Gravity turned upside down and Oliver cancelled it; the air turned cold enough to freeze solid but he heated it; he deflected a lance of light back into the feybreed mob as he turned away a blow to his spine from Flare. Oliver fired a charge into the empty space where the translucent guardsman was trying to sneak up on him, the broken glass of the shell crunching as he ejected it.

More Whisperer-things broke against his mind, compressing his skull with pain. Oliver severed their mental link, killing them instantly, but in the second it took to twist away their attack Captain Flare landed a kick against his side, not dampened. It was as if someone had collapsed a house around him. He tried to rise but a dozen guardsmen were on top of him, striking with their fists and their boots and their mist-gifted powers.

They hauled him to his feet, beaten and bloody. Steamswipe was behind them, wheezing and broken on the chewed-up ground. Oliver’s bruised eyes rolled across the sky. No sign of the aerosphere. Harry had gone, forced to face the Court’s justice at last. It was over. Oliver had failed Jackals and the Lady of the Lights, failed to punish his family’s killers, failed to honour his father’s legacy or even to protect his friends’ lives.

‘What’s it to be, brother?’ said Flare.

‘I see you,’ Oliver roared. ‘I see you all. The evil that taints your souls.’ He concentrated on the fallen steamman. Lord Wireburn flew from the side of the prone knight and out towards Oliver’s hand, only to slap into the grip of a Special Guardsman who shimmered into existence between them. The guardsman reversed the holy weapon and shoved its ebony butt into his face. Then Oliver’s thrashing really began.

Someone was standing in front of the light at the end of the tunnel. Molly stepped forward apprehensively. She had no idea how she had got here — although she knew there were things that had happened to her that she should have been able to remember.

The silhouette of the figure beckoned her; as she got nearer it became more detailed. It was a girl. Someone who should be familiar, someone Molly knew, a figure in the corridor of a house at night. Tock House, the name leapt at her. Something had happened at Tock House, the thing she should be able to remember. Confused, she peered closer at the girl — less ghost-like, more solid, but still as silent as a mime.

Molly tried to speak with her voice, but nothing came out. That was not the way to communicate with this apparition of … a steamman, Silver Onestack. That name brought more flashes of memory images. But the girl was her spectre now, not the steamman’s. She fair glowed, giving off warmth that comforted the pain in Molly’s heart.

‹Is this a perfect moment?› Molly asked, finding the right register to communicate.

The spectre just smiled and pointed at the light.

‹For me?›

The girl nodded.

The light grew, enveloping her, freezing her with its clarity. Then it grew dim and she was on a mud floor in a cave-like cell. The hardness of the floor, the stiffness in her bones and the tingling she felt on her skin — this was real.

‘Molly,’ said Nickleby.

She rolled over. The pensman and Commodore Black were in the cell with her.

‘I-’ she could not finish her words, choking and coughing.

‘Ah, lass,’ said the commodore. ‘That’s it, cough it out. We were dirt-gassed and you the lightest in weight of us all. It was cut mortal thin though, or we would have left our lungs back at Tock House.’

Molly looked around the cell. No beds, a night pan — more for the guards’ comfort than theirs, she suspected. Metal bars joined the ceiling to the floor; the back of the room was a slope of rock.

‘Where is Aliquot?’

‘He wasn’t with us when we woke up,’ said Nickleby. ‘I think he must have slipped past them in the fighting.’

‘Aye, either that or gone down with Tock House,’ said the commodore. ‘Dirt-gas could scrub his crystals. That’s the way you take a boat too, when she’s on the surface and you want to board her easy. Cut her hull and pump her full of gas, have the sailors running around like rabbits in a warren; then you send down the stoats.’

‘He can seal off the air flues to his boiler system, run cold. Coppertracks could last hours without needing air.’

‘Perhaps,’ said the commodore. ‘But it still leaves us here, hanging like hares in the larder. Waiting for our precious necks to be sliced.’

Molly pressed her face to the bars. She thought she had heard the footsteps of someone coming.

‘But who is to be doing the slicing?’ asked Nickleby.

A voice came down the corridor. ‘A good question, to be sure.’

It was Count Vauxtion, a party of black-clad toppers at his heels and a woman, her grey hair tied into buns. Count Vauxtion looked at the woman. ‘You can confirm her blood machine record?’

‘I can,’ she replied. ‘She is the genuine article. I am already preparing arrangements to pay your finder’s fee.’

‘ She has a name,’ spat Molly, pressing her face to the bars. ‘Are you the one paying for my head?’

‘I am just the assessor, m’dear,’ said the woman. ‘You would be surprised how many disfigured corpses have been handed in to me from unscrupulous sources who are only too happy to claim the money on your scalp without doing the actual mug-hunting.’

‘Blessed hard to come by an honest murderer, then,’ said the commodore.

‘Quite,’ said the woman. ‘But the good news is that we both get paid our commission now.’ She turned to one of the toppers. ‘Unlock the door. If the girl gives you any trouble, kill these two bumpkins. If these two give you any trouble, you can still kill them — but cut off one of the girl’s ears first. She doesn’t need to hear to be of use to our employer.’

The count turned to an old craynarbian standing behind them and indicated they would depart, but the assessor raised her hand. ‘The contract says “to the satisfaction of the patron”, Compatriot Vauxtion. I have yet to hear him express that satisfaction.’

‘You appear better informed than I, madam,’ said the count. ‘I was not even certain that the patron was a him .’

‘Smoke and mirrors, hmm?’ said the female assessor. ‘Well, allow me to satisfy your curiosity. You will find him a fascin ating fellow, I believe.’

The craynarbian retainer leant close and whispered something to Count Vauxtion and he nodded. Molly was prodded in the back by a topper and she and her two companions were led down a corridor past empty cells. At the end of the passage a pair of double iron doors was unchained and opened.

Molly gasped. She had been expecting the basement of some rich lunatic’s mansion in Middlesteel — not this. Wide steps sweeping down to a landscape littered with broken ziggurats; the crimson light of Chimecan crystals in the cavern ceiling, painting the landscape in an eternal twilight. Most of the ruins were wild, overgrown with spiked fungus spheres and flat, red cavern grass like a sea of fire. Paths had been cleared through the undergrowth, boxes of equipment piled behind wire fences. On the other side of the ruins she could see a tent city stretched out in ordered rows, the light from human buildings and the hum of industry. She had come full circle.