The Court of the Air Read online

She would not be waking.

  Who had done this? The world had gone mad. Toppers breaking into bawdy shops. The same senseless slaughter at the Sun Gate poorhouse.

  ‘Molly.’ A voice sounded from the linen chest. Something moved under the blankets. It was Ver’fey, the craynarbian girl. She was wounded, one of the orange shell-plates of her crab-like armour shattered above the shoulder.

  ‘Ver’fey! Your shoulder…’ Molly ran to her. ‘For the love of the Circle, what happened here?’

  ‘Men,’ coughed the craynarbian. ‘They came dressed as crushers from the ninth precinct, but they were no con stables, I knew at once.’

  She should know. Half of Middlesteel’s police force was craynarbian; their tough exo-skeletons made them natural soldiers and keepers of parliament’s peace.

  ‘They did this?’

  ‘They were looking for you, Molly.’

  ‘Me?’

  Ver’fey sat down on the chest, exhausted. ‘Rachael told them that the Beadle had sent you off somewhere, but he wouldn’t tell any of the rest of us where you were. Just said you’d finally got the job you deserved. One of the men thought Rachael was lying and started laying into her with his Sleeping Henry. They just beat her to death in front of us. We tried to stop them; that was when they gave me this.’ She pointed to her broken shoulder plate.

  ‘Where are all the others?’ Molly looked around the dormitory.

  ‘Took them,’ sobbed the craynarbian. ‘Took them all. The boys too.’

  ‘Why?’ said Molly. ‘What would they want with us?’

  ‘Better you ask what they wanted with you, Molly. It was you they were after. What have you done, Molly?’

  ‘Nothing that the rest of you weren’t up to,’ spat Molly. ‘None of this makes any sense.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s your family?’

  ‘What family?’ said Molly. ‘You are my bleeding family.’

  ‘Your blood family,’ said Ver’fey. ‘Perhaps they’re rich. Rich and powerful enough to hire a gang of toppers. Some father who’s just found out he has an unwanted bastard and is out to simplify the act of inheritance.’

  Molly grimaced. Simplifying the act of inheritance was Jackelian slang for leaving an unwanted child on the poorhouse doorstep. Ver’fey’s theory had the ring of truth to it. She had never once felt wanted in her life, but this was preposterous. Perhaps her mother had abandoned her at Sun Gate out of love after all, out of fear of what might happen to her if her father found out he had sired a bastard

  ‘Come on old shell.’ Molly helped Ver’fey out of her hiding place. ‘They’ve cleared off. Best we do likewise, before someone comes back.’

  ‘You could come with me to Shell Town,’ said Ver’fey. ‘Hide out.’

  ‘Unless you can fix me up with armour and an extra pair of arms, I’m going to stick out like a sore thumb in Shell Town. You’d be in danger every minute I was with you.’

  ‘But where can you go?’ asked Ver’fey.

  ‘The Beadle always said I’d end up running with the flash mob. Reckon I’ll prove him right and disappear into the under-city – try to reach Grimhope and the outlaws.’

  ‘That’s too dangerous, Molly,’ said Ver’fey. ‘Do you even know how to get into the undercity?’

  ‘I do,’ said Molly. ‘Don’t you remember when Rachael was working for the atmospheric authority?’

  ‘Yes! Guardian Rathbone station.’

  Guardian Rathbone station was the main terminus on the atmospheric network for Sun Gate’s workers. Thousands of clerks and clackers rode the tube capsules in through the tunnels every day, large steam engines labouring to create the airless vacuum the trains traversed.

  ‘There are entrances to the undercity in the atmospheric. Rachael was always going on about them. It’ll be safer than going in through the sewers.’

  Ver’fey agreed. There were plenty of things in Middlesteel’s sewers, but none you would want to run into on your own. The city’s sewer scrapers only went inside armed in teams of five or six. ‘Please, Molly, you come with me to Shell Town. It’s no life for you in the undercity. There’s nothing down there but junkers, rebels and the flash mob. If some criminal doesn’t do for you, the political police will – they’re always pumping dirt-gas down into the tunnels to cull outlaws.’

  Molly shook her head and knelt down beside Rachael’s body. ‘She was always the sensible one, our Rachael. Settle down to a nice safe job. Keep your nose clean. Don’t answer back.’

  Ver’fey tried to pull Molly away. ‘You’re right, we should go now.’

  ‘Look where it got her, Ver-Ver. Bloody dead in this rotting dung heap of a home.’

  ‘Please, Molly.’

  Molly picked up a candle and threw it into a pile of penny dreadfuls, the cheap paper catching light immediately. Flames jumped across the hemp blankets, crackling like a roasting pig.

  ‘A warrior’s pyre, for you, Rachael, and when I find the filthy glocker scum that did this to you – to us – I’ll burn them too and everything they hold dear. I swear it.’

  Ver’fey trembled nervously on her feet. ‘Molly! Oh Molly, what have you done?’

  ‘Let it burn,’ said Molly, suddenly weary. She led Ver’fey back out of the dormitory before the flames took the rickety wooden stairs. ‘Let it all burn to the bloody ground.’

  First Guardian Hoggstone tapped his shoe impatiently against the large porcelain vase standing by his writing desk, scenes of triumph from the civil war rendered delicately in obsidian blue. The weekly meeting with King Julius was a tiresome formality, little more than a cover for the chance to be updated by the commander of the Special Guard. Still, parliament held to its ancient forms. Two worldsingers stood silently flanking the door to the First Guardian’s office. Hoggstone smiled to himself. The Special Guard watched the King. The worldsingers watched the Special Guard. He watched the worldsingers. And who watched the First Guardian? Why, the electorate of course. That anonymous amorphous herd; that howling mob in waiting. Captain Flare came into the room. Without the King, but with the pup, Crown Prince Alpheus, in tow instead.

  ‘Julius?’ asked Hoggstone in a sharp voice.

  ‘Waterman’s sickness again,’ answered the captain. ‘He won’t be leaving the palace for at least a week.’

  Hoggstone sighed and looked at the pup. It always made him nervous, seeing an almost crowned monarch with his arms still attached to his body.

  ‘Why, sir, is the boy not wearing his face mask?’

  ‘Asthma,’ said Captain Flare. ‘In the heat he chokes sometimes.’

  ‘I hate the mask,’ complained the prince. ‘The iron rubs my ears until they bleed.’

  Hoggstone sighed again. ‘We’ll find you some royal whore, pup, for you to breed us the next king on. Then I’ll try and convince the house not to teach it to talk. Waste of bloody time having you able to say anything except parrot the vows of affirmation once a week.’

  ‘I hate you!’

  Hoggstone rose up and drove a ham-sized fist into the prince’s stomach. The boy doubled up on the floor and the First Guardian kicked him in the head. ‘As it should be, Your Highness. Now shut up, or we’ll take your arms off early, cover them in gold plate and show them next to your father’s down in the People’s Hall.’

  Flare lifted the gagging, gasping boy up and put him down on a chair. ‘Was that necessary, First Guardian?’

  ‘It was to me,’ said Hoggstone. The shepherd, that’s what they called Captain Flare behind his back. That’s what he had been, a herd boy, when a feymist had risen on the moors, turning Flare into a feybreed, giving him the kind of physical strength that demigods from classical history only dreamt about. But the man was soft, a useful fool protecting his new flock. The people. Yes. Everything for the people.

  ‘We’re not as modern as the Commonshare, sir,’ said Hoggstone. ‘Running all our nobles through a Gideon’s Collar. We still have to rely on a bit of shoe leather and a stout Jackelian foot every now and then.’


  ‘It’s putting the Jackelian boot in that you want to talk about?’ asked Flare. ‘The Carlists?’

  ‘I don’t even know if we can call the people we’re facing Carlists any more,’ said Hoggstone. ‘The local mob seems to have moved beyond the normal communityist platitudes our compatriots in Quatérshift have been mouthing of late.’

  ‘You suspect something?’

  ‘There’s trouble being stirred in the streets. Too much and too widely spread for it to be anything other than organized.’

  ‘That’s what the House of Guardians’ Executive Investigations Arm is for,’ said Flare.

  ‘The g-men have been cracking the usual skulls, netting the usual suspects. Whatever’s happening out there on the streets, the old-time Carlists are as afraid of it as we are. Their leaders have been disappearing, at least, all the ones who have been opposing the new generation of rabble-rousers. The river police have been pulling the corpses of Carlist committeemen out of the Gambleflowers for a year now.’

  ‘You have a target in mind for the Special Guard?’

  Hoggstone sounded frustrated. ‘This isn’t a Cassarabian bandit sheikh or a royalist pirate flotilla you can smash for the state – this needs subtlety.’

  ‘I can rip plate metal apart with my bare hands,’ Flare pointed out. ‘Rifle charges bounce off me and my skin can blunt a fencing foil. I am not sure the Special Guard can do subtlety.’

  ‘But there are others who can,’ said Hoggstone.

  Flare’s eyes narrowed. ‘You are talking of the fey in Hawklam Asylum.’

  One of the worldsingers flanking the door moved forward. ‘First Guardian!’

  ‘Stand back.’ Hoggstone’s voice was raised. ‘Damn your eyes, I do know how the order feel about the things we have contained in Hawklam.’

  ‘They are there for a reason,’ said the worldsinger. ‘The abominations they have endured have twisted the creatures’ minds far more than their bodies. Those things have as much left in common with beings such as ourselves as we do with an infestation of loft-rot beetles, and, given the chance, they would treat us much the same.’

  ‘It is their minds which interest me. We do not need many – just a couple with the talent to root out the core of the enemy in our midst.’

  ‘Soul-sniffers,’ gasped the worldsinger. ‘You believe the order would release soul-sniffers into the world.’

  ‘The people would not like it,’ advised Flare.

  ‘I am the people, sir!’ Hoggstone roared. ‘The voice of the

  people, for the people. And I will not let the people fall under the spell of a horde of communityist rabble-rousers. I will not have the talent and prosperity of this nation run through a Gideon’s Collar like so much mince through a sausage grinder. I will not!’ Hoggstone slammed his writing desk and thrust a finger towards Captain Flare. ‘You think that if the people see the misshapen human wreckage in Hawklam Asylum the mob might stop worshipping the ground the Guard walk on. Start associating your guardsmen with feybreed abominations rather than the latest damn issue of The Middlesteel Illustrated with a stonecutting of your face grinning on the cover.’

  ‘It is possible,’ Flare acknowledged.

  ‘The art of leadership is knowing when the mob’s applause has become a self-destructive echo,’ said Hoggstone. ‘If the choice is the veil being pulled off your perfect persona or the state collapsing into anarchy and mayhem, I’ll choose the former over the latter. But do not worry, we shall keep the feybreed on a short leash and run them only at night. After all, it does not do to scare the voters.’

  ‘We will need to fashion special torc suits for them,’ said the worldsinger. ‘And organize teams to make sure the abomi nations don’t slip them.’

  Hoggstone gestured wearily. ‘Do it, then. We need to know who is behind the unrest and when they intend to act, when they intend to take advantage of their mischief.’

  ‘As you will.’

  ‘As the people will, sir. And for the Circle’s sake, put the gag back on the royal pup before you leave the House. I don’t want The Middlesteel Illustrated running a story on him being seen naked within parliament’s walls.’

  Chapter Six

  Ver’fey tapped Molly with one of her manipulator limbs, the short one under her big bone-sword arm. ‘Molly, we’re being followed.’ The craynarbian had never seen a creeper or vine in Liongeli, but she still had her jungle senses.

  ‘From where?’

  ‘As we turned off Watercourse Avenue.’

  Molly swore to herself. They had set watchers outside the poorhouse then. Damn her family. It was one thing to know from your earliest years you had never been wanted, cast out like the previous night’s garbage. It was quite another to have your own blood trying to tidy up loose ends by slitting your throat. ‘How many?’

  ‘Two men.’

  Molly pondered their options. ‘If it is me they want and they’ve clocked me, their numbers won’t stay at two for long. The gang that did for Rachael and the house will be swarming over Sun Gate.’

  Ver’fey gestured off the street with her bone-sword. ‘We could play alley-dodge, then slice them good.’

  Molly shook her head. ‘You’re a game bird, Ver-Ver, but the two of us are no match for a crew of professional toppers. End of the street, you jump left for Shell Town, I’ll cut right and lose them in the Angel’s Crust.’

  Ver’fey made a noise of disgust. Like all her kind, she would only be seen dead in a jinn house – quite literally. The only effects the pink-coloured drink had on craynarbians were to make them vomit and to slow their hearts to a dangerously low palpitation.

  ‘Luck to us,’ said Ver’fey.

  ‘You blooming well look after yourself, Ver-Ver,’ said Molly.

  They got to the end of the street and Molly lunged right and up Shambles Lane, the sound of Ver’fey’s heavy, shell-covered body clattering the opposite way fading as she found the narrow corridors of the Pinchfield rookeries. The Angel’s Crust was up the Shambles and on the left, a three-storey temple to Middlesteel’s sinners; the low-rent equivalent of Fairborn and Jarndyce. Two floors of drunken loutish revelry with bedrooms on the third floor, where women with low necklines and even lower morals plied Middlesteel’s oldest trade.

  As she sprinted for the bright yellow light of the place, Molly caught a glimpse of two shadows racing after her. Even as she cursed, part of her was glad they had left Ver’fey to escape; the craynarbian girl could move fast over a short distance, but her armour made her a poor bet for a marathon chase. This was confirmation. Someone wanted Molly dead. Very badly indeed.

  Molly hurdled a clump of collapsed snoring drinkers and hurtled through the doorless entrance. She blundered into a drinker, spraying jinn over the sawdust on the floor.

  ‘Crushers,’ Molly yelled like a banshee. ‘Get out – it’s a raid. Ham Street bawdy.’

  The ground floor erupted in confusion as chairs wrenched back and the surge for the exits started. If there was an honest man or woman drinking or conducting business in the Angel’s Crust, they were here by mistake. Like many of the girls at the Sun Gate workhouse, Molly had earned pennies in the evening moonlighting as a watch girl at the Angel.

  A pistol charge rang out by the door and something pinged off one of the roof beams, followed by a swell of uproar and even more confusion. Her two pursuers were in the taproom and Molly dived low, riding and hiding in the panicked flow of the crowd. One of the barkeeps shoved past her clutching an old black blunderbuss. She went under the bar and darted through to the cellar, racing around walls of piled oak jinn barrels, each burned with the red marque of its Cassarabian exporter.

  Thank the Circle. The old staff chute was still there, behind a tattered cloth curtain. Their backdoor if a rival flash mob decided to move in on the Angel. Molly was careful to leave the cloth in place as she shoved off down the short slide, landing in a puddle of grimy water and rotting bottle corks at the foot of the tumbledown rookeries beyond.
r />   The maze of corridors changed all the time as the inhabitants added new doorways or closed off collapsed tenements. Little chance of them catching her now. She navigated the claustrophobic streets towards the back end of the Guardian Rathbone atmospheric. Molly smelt it before she saw it; two columns of large stacks pouring dark coal smoke into the sky, keeping the atmospheric’s tunnels in vacuum.

  Guardian Rathbone station was a castle of white marble stained black with soot, arched domes of glass and girders crisscrossing the passenger concourse. It was thought to be one of the most magnificent stations on the atmospheric – rivalling Guardian Fairfax station out by the palace, perhaps even Guardian Kelvin station across from the House of Guardians. It would be dangerous now, though; too late for Molly to work the mob of Sun Gate clerks going home as camouflage; just a few revellers belatedly leaving the respectable cafes and salons along Goldhair Park.

  Three steammen were cleaning the concourse, collecting rubbish and polishing the mosaic of the Battle of Clawfoot Moor, the scene of parliament’s final victory in the civil war. Molly had to get out of here fast. The atmospheric was too obvious an escape route. She checked her money. A penny short of the cheapest journey on the atmospheric. Damn. If she had realized earlier she could have dipped someone’s wallet back at the Angel’s Crust.

  At the end of the station two figures in dark jackets walked onto the concourse. Molly danced into the shadow cast by one of the steammen, an iron skip on short stubby legs. No chance now to vault the ticket rail and make a dash for the underground platforms – the two bruisers would clock her. Of course, they might be innocent, watchmen for one of the Sun Gate towers. Sneaking a peek over the iron box, Molly saw they had split up and were drifting through the sparse queue of passengers, sweeping the hall in a precise pattern. Not so innocent, then.

  She went over the side of the iron skip, sliding into sacks of litter. The head of the steamman swivelled around to regard her. ‘Ho, little softbody. What are you doing in my collection of gewgaws?’

  ‘Quietly with your speaking tube,’ Molly pleaded. ‘Two men are searching for me. They mean me harm.’