Stephen Hunt - The Court of the Air

Black watched the ferocious assault with admiration. ‘I never thought I would be so glad to see a pack of blessed parliamentarians.’

Two styles of debating stick beat aside the pikes and smashed in metal-flesher skulls — the street fighters of the Roarers and the Young Purist movement had joined forces! It was a fight to the death, no quarter asked for or given and numbers were not on the revolutionaries’ side. Soon the street was littered with iron bodies jerking in the snow, calculation drums banging while what blood still cycled around their gutta-percha tubes leaked onto the ground.

The Jackelian street fighters moved like a well-oiled machine, dragging the equalized bodies out of sight into the rookeries’ alleyways, the Quatershiftian dead stripped of uniforms and weapons then tossed aside like garbage. A girl ran up to the window of the shop and dipped a brush into a bucket of red paint, daubing the windows and walls with a line of upside down Vs.

‘The lion’s teeth,’ said a large man walking up to Oliver and the commodore. ‘The Lion of Jackals. Mister Locke?’

The commodore shook his head. Oliver pointed to Mother’s body in the snow. ‘Locke’s gone. Damson Loade is dead.’

The man motioned to the street fighters and they hauled the equalized corpses blocking the shop’s corridor out of the way, returning with arms full of rifles and pistols and rolling glass-lined casks of blow-barrel sap.

‘I see she took a few of them with her when she moved along the Circle; a true patriot. You, sir, you were putting up a rare old fight too. We could hear the battle from the other end of Whineside. Are you Heartlanders?’

‘I’m more of an independent thinking man,’ said Black.

Oliver looked at the large man, his boxer’s nose and thinning hair. No wonder he looked familiar. ‘You’re the First Guardian!’

‘Politics in Jackals are not what they used to be,’ said Hoggstone.

Cries came from the rooftop; a lookout had climbed one of the chimneystacks. ‘Cavalry, cavalry.’

Bearing away the contents of Mother’s weapons warehouse, the street fighters streamed down the lanes, the entire force melting away. Oliver had once seen a torrent of black rodents running past bales of cargo after a lamp was lit in his uncle’s Ship Town warehouse, an army of rats evaporating in front of his eyes. These fighters were faster.

The girl who had sounded the alarm slid down a drainpipe. ‘Exomounts, riding in from the north.’

‘They must have got to the stables at Ham Yard before the hands could poison them,’ said Hoggstone. He looked at the commodore and Oliver. ‘Can independents alley dodge?’

Black nodded. ‘With the best of them.’

Oliver could hear the roll of the charge getting nearer as they fled into the passages of the rookeries. He had once seen an exomount being taken to stud in Kikkosico, the narrow boat shaking as the cage rocked with the violence of the animal. They were taken off their craynarbian sedatives before being ridden. Too slow off the herbal soporific and they were groggy and sluggish in battle, too fast and they would as like throw their rider and devour them. The timing was critical. Oliver hoped the steeds had only just been released, but the hail of claws across the street cobbles told him otherwise.

Hoggstone ran well for someone whose gut had been trained on the finest cuisine Middlesteel could serve for the last few years. The passages narrowed, some so tapered the snow had not yet had a chance to drift in and settle, broken walls leading underneath pipes and lines of washing hanging out above them.

A howling echoed around the rookery streets.

‘Their lancers can’t squeeze through these passages,’ said Hoggstone, using his metal-tipped debating stick to push over a pyramid of wood piled for someone’s stove. ‘And those metal cans they are shoving people into don’t see so well in the gloom of the runs.’

‘Infantry,’ said Oliver. ‘Third Brigade ahead.’

‘The shifties don’t come into the lanes,’ said Hoggstone. ‘Too many ambush points.’

The clatter of boots ahead made his words a lie.

‘The lad has a talent for sniffing out trouble, Hoggstone,’ said the commodore.

They retreated and took a side passage, increasing their speed to as much of a sprint as they could manage through the dirty streets. They ran up some wooden steps and along a street composed of rickety gantries, open doors leading into tenement halls. Hardly anybody was out — with armed revolutionaries and Quatershiftian troops prowling the streets the population of Middlesteel were hunkering down in their homes. They heard the sounds of carousing down one alley. A jinn house — still open and some of the rookery denizens drinking the place dry while their currency still had value. Before the Commonshare of Jackals emulated its neighbour to the east and made the production, transport and sale of liquid stimulants illegal for their part in undermining community production quotas.

Hoggstone stopped, catching his breath for a second. ‘They know where we are. Every time we reach one of the streets that leads out of the lanes they are waiting for us.’

Oliver nodded. This was a game of chess and the shiftie pieces were being moved with a preternatural clarity. If it weren’t for his forewarnings of the soldiers’ positions they would have walked into a dozen traps already. Commodore Black shaded his eyes against the sun peering out from behind clouds pregnant with snow, scanning the strip of sky above the narrow street. ‘There!’

Oliver gazed where the commodore was pointing and saw three triangles of white material turning below the clouds. ‘That’s not an aerostat, commodore.’

‘It’s a blessed sail rider, lad. Look at him flashing his helio-plate to his friends on the ground. Shiftie vessels would sometimes float them up above their decks if they thought they were being hunted by our boats.’

Oliver broke one of his pistols and slipped out a crystal charge, pushing it into the gun and closing it.

‘You won’t hit him from here, man,’ said Hoggstone. ‘The best rifleman in the regiments would be hard pressed to clip the sail with a long gun, let alone hit the rider.’

The clockwork of the hammer mechanism hummed as Oliver tightened his finger around the trigger, shadow images fleeting through his mind; a horse mounting a sand dune in the far distance, its rider spilling off as he fired; a woman sprinting across ice sheets bobbing in a frozen ocean, no more than a far-off silver dot glinting in the sunlight, a single shot lifting her corpse into the glacial waters. Oliver blinked away the waking dreams. ‘Then you had best be quiet, First Guardian.’

He rested the pistol on his left arm, the crack of the glass shell followed by an explosion that echoed off peeling posters for a drink that had not been sold in Middlesteel for a decade. High above a grey dot separated from the sail and plunged towards the ground, the riderless kite deforming and drifting up like a hawk climbing for height.

‘Hard to control one of those things,’ said Oliver. ‘When you’re not harnessed to it.’

‘Well I’ll be jiggered,’ exclaimed Hoggstone, as Oliver ejected the broken glass charge onto the dirt of the lane. ‘You, sir, are quite the shootist.’

‘There are patrols all over the area now,’ said Oliver. ‘Our friend in the sky has done his job.’

‘I know a way,’ said the lookout girl. ‘You follow me.’

Dashing through the tenement halls, the girl found her three charges hard-pressed to keep up with her youthful, eclectic running style, kicking off walls and flowing over fences. Their way became gloomier, down into the cellar levels, passages that were notoriously unsafe. Most were boarded up, others abandoned and empty since the centuries of long Jackelian winters had given way to a milder climate. Deeper still and the stench of sewage rose like bad eggs, making Oliver’s stomach turn.