The Court of the Air

Molly had rarely been on the public atmospheric, but the windowless capsule made for a featureless journey, the only variation in their speed the slight deceleration and acceleration as they passed pressure-pumping stations.

After half an hour of near silent travel the service capsule braked to a halt and Slowcogs pulled a mask with goggling eyes out of a crate, attaching it to a brass oxygen cylinder with back-straps dangling from its front. ‘There is still vacuum outside. Place this over your face and I will help you strap on the cylinder.’

The small canister felt heavier than it looked and Molly nearly buckled with the weight of it digging into her back. Slowcogs adjusted the straps and the weight was redistributed, her field of vision shrinking to the view through the mask’s two crystal eyepieces. It took a moment or two to get used to the mask – everything appeared further away than it actually was.

When Slowcogs was satisfied she could move and breathe, the steamman equalized pressure with the tunnel outside and they stepped onto a stone platform set inside one of the atmospheric’s receiving valves, littered with tunnelling equipment, lead solder and bags of sand. Their platform was lit by the same green light that had illuminated the atmospheric capsule – the tunnel seemed to shine with it. Molly walked past the buffers that had caught the service capsule and ran her hand along the cold wall. The tip of her thumb shone with a green lichen smear.

Slowcogs beckoned Molly along the platform, rolling to a vault-like door in the stone. It opened onto a small room and another door. Pulling a chain hanging from a machine in the corner, Slowcogs moved back towards Molly as the hissing sound made her ears pop.

‘You can breathe in here,’ Slowcogs said, pulling Molly’s air tank off her back. ‘The passages of the undercity start beyond this door.’

A weight lifted from Molly’s shoulders. ‘They’ll never find me down here, Slowcogs. We’re free.’

‘Freedom from rules does not equate to safety,’ said Slowcogs. ‘With softbodies I have often noted the opposite to be the case.’

Slowcogs pulled back the second door and Molly gasped. A hall lay beyond, stairs leading downwards. It was massive, a vast cathedral of space, columns supporting the ceiling, statues as big as Middlesteel houses in alcoves shadowed by the lichen light.

‘I don’t understand,’ Molly said, overwhelmed by the scale of the space.

‘The under-people and outlaws live here now,’ said Slowcogs. ‘But they did not build this. Thousands of years ago Jackals lay under the rule of the old empire, Chimeca. These ruins are their legacy.’

Chimeca. That was ancient history, but Molly dimly recalled lessons of insect gods, locust priests and human sacrifice. ‘I thought the undercity was just an old level of Middlesteel under the sewers that had been built over.’

Slowcogs shook his head. ‘No, it was always thus. There was a period of great cold in ancient times and to survive the Chimecans riddled the earth with their cities below the surface. It is said the first steammen Loas date from that age, holy machines.’

Molly stared at bird bats circling near the ceiling, tiny dots of black. ‘I always wondered why the political police couldn’t just dirt-gas the outlaws. The crushers could lose a whole legion of police militia down here.’

‘Only a small fraction of the passages are known to us,’ said Slowcogs. ‘Much of it now rests collapsed by the ages. What you see runs deep and far. Entire sub-cities have crumbled as the earth has twisted and turned on its journey across the great pattern.’

Molly looked at a large section of wall collapsed over the stairs half a mile down-slope. ‘As long as it doesn’t cave in while we’re here.’

‘This exit was chosen by Redrust for both its stability and its remoteness from Grimhope,’ said Slowcogs. ‘There should not be any sentries here. Only the workers of the atmospheric know of its existence.’

‘The outlaw city is still down here?’ asked Molly.

‘I believe so, in body if not in spirit,’ replied Slowcogs. His wheel axles spidered down the stairs, leading them to a much smaller staircase hidden behind one of the statue alcoves. ‘This passage heads to the outskirts of the great cavern of the Duitzilopochtli Deeps; Grimhope stands there at the centre of the fungal forest, a day and a night’s travel from our present location.’

Molly and Slowcogs descended down the side passage for hours, the light-lichen growing fitfully in places, plunging them into near darkness. Occasionally the stairs deviated into boxlike rest chambers; plain bed-slabs carved from the walls. If their journey had been uphill rather than down they would have been glad of the respite. As it was, Slowcogs had already pronounced the fungal forest as their first rest stop. Eventually the path forked in four directions and Slowcogs started to lead them down the passage on the far left.

The exit became a bright dot in the distance two hours later. Molly’s legs ached after the effort of tackling the stairs, her calves tight and cramped. She stepped outside the tunnel.

For a moment Molly thought that there must have been some mistake – a trick of gravity – that they had walked back to the surface, the green lichen-light replaced by bright daylight. Her eyes watered after the dim darkness of the side passage. Blinking away tears, she saw she was standing at the foot of a cliff, a rock wall towering away into the mist a thousand feet above them. The fog was suffused with red light and crackled intermittently with raw, lightning-like energies.

Below the mist, stretching as far as she could see, a forest of mushrooms crouched as tall and dense as oak. Many of the fungal growths were ebony-dark, but there were splashes of colour in the forest too, fluted fungal spires with bright mottled markings of scarlet, gold and jade.

‘By the Circle,’ said Molly. ‘It’s handsome. It’s like there’s a sun down here.’

‘Observe.’ Slowcogs pointed to a gap in the vapour along the cavern’s haze-wrapped ceiling. ‘Not one sun, but many. Crystals left by the empire of Chimeca’s sorcerers. They used the crystal machines much as Jackals uses her worldsingers, to direct and tap the flow of the leylines’ earthflow, to stop their underground cities being crushed by the turning of the world. The sparks you see are the violence of the world diverted into light.’

‘Shall we press on now?’ Molly pointed towards the forest.

‘Sleep first,’ said Slowcogs. ‘We are at the far northern end of the Duitzilopochtli Deeps. The outlaw city has most of its sentries to the south, where the easy entrances from Middlesteel are positioned – the sewer outlets.’

Slowcogs led them along the cliff wall until they came to the façade of an old temple carved into the rock. On one side of the entrance a seated stone figure crouched, human except for an ugly beetle’s head. It was matched on the other side by a second seated man-statue, a mammoth spider-head rising from its neck.

‘I don’t like the feel of this place,’ said Molly. ‘Not one bit.’

‘The old gods lost their power after the fall of Chimeca,’ said Slowcogs. ‘The temples and forces of ancient Wildcaotyl have no capability here now. It will be better to sleep within these walls. There are prides of pecks living inside the forest.’

Despite her misgivings, Molly accepted the steamman’s advice. It was only when she got inside the temple that the wave of tiredness overtook her. Molly shivered. Locust priests had once practised their dark rites down here … she could feel it. From what she recalled from her poorhouse lessons, the pantheon of Wildcaotyl gods still lingered over the world like an ugly ancestral memory; each deity more obscene than the last – from lesser gods such as Khemchiuhtlicue Blood-drinker and Scorehueteotl Stake-burner, right up to Xam-Ku himself, old Father Spider.

It was the middle of the night in Middlesteel above, and she finally fell into a deep dream-filled sleep. Rachael’s ghost came to speak to her, warning that Grimhope was no place for a nice Sun Gate girl, telling her that she should find a respectable job as a seamstress. Next the Beadle came; his body still covered in the torture marks of the gang that had stormed the poorhouse. He shouted at Molly that she was headed for the gallows outside Bonegate – until he was decapitated by the refined old assassin from the bawdyhouse, whose cane split into twin sword sticks like a conjurer’s trick.

‘Where’s my father?’ Molly demanded of the killer.

‘I am your father,’ said the assassin. ‘And you are such a terrible disappointment to the family. I don’t think we can bear your existence any more.’

‘You shouldn’t be trying to kill me,’ said Molly. ‘I want to speak to my mother.’

‘She died of shame,’ said the assassin. ‘After you were born.’

‘That’s not true.’

The topper shoved her to the dirt, pushing her red hair back from the nape of her neck. ‘Time to die, Molly Templar.’

‘Please,’ Molly pleaded. ‘I just want to see my mother once before you kill me.’

‘Hold still. I’ll send you to her now.’

It was Slowcogs that shook her awake, rather than the kiss of cold sabre steel. Molly groaned.

‘It is midday in the world above, Molly softbody. Time to move on.’

The first growths in the fungal forest were tall white mushroom trees with multiple cups and red mottling; then the lichen-covered ground grew denser with darker single-cup growths. At times they needed to retrace their steps so Slowcogs could squeeze through the thick forest.

Molly watched a squirrel-like rodent chewing on one of the trunks. ‘You could live free out here, Slowcogs. If you didn’t mind a diet of mushrooms.’

‘Grimhope is safer,’ said the steamman. ‘Relatively speaking.’

‘Is it still like the legends of the Green Man?’

‘I doubt if it ever was the place of your tales, Molly soft-body,’ said Slowcogs. Then, as if it explained everything, he added, ‘It is an outlaw city.’

‘They will welcome us there?’

‘My people have not updated our knowledge of Grimhope for many years,’ said Slowcogs. ‘There are few outlaw steammen; although one of our kind does live down here. Silver Onestack. He is a desecration.’

‘You mean he is malfunctioning?’