The Court of the Air

‘No. More like it had been branded there.’

‘Armiral.’ Harry called the grasper back into the narrowboat’s cabin. ‘Get a pencil for the boy. Oliver, draw for us the mark you saw.’

Oliver sketched out a circle with three slanting lines drawn through it.

‘What do you think?’ Harry asked the grasper boat master.

‘Celgas miner from Shadowclock.’

‘That’s what I thought too,’ said Harry.

Armiral leant against the open door to the deck and scratched his heavy-jowled face thoughtfully. ‘Each line represents a cave-in survived – few of our people reach three. The one who wore this will be senior, Harry. High warren.’

Oliver remembered the way the visiting grasper had scuttled inside Seventy Star Hall. Like he was glad to trade the space and sky outside for the confines of the hall. ‘Uncle Titus didn’t have any contracts with the celgas mines. Why would he be meeting a mining combination man?’

‘Nobody has contracts directly with Shadowclock, Oliver. The State Victualling Board handles it. The place is practically a closed city – only town with a military governor appointed by parliament instead of an elected mayor. There are plenty of people who’ve died for the riches under the mountains at Shadowclock. Smugglers, agents from every great power on the continent, gas runners. If Titus found some mischief going on at Shadowclock, then I don’t doubt there’s some rascals out there who would judge his murder and our deaths a cheap price to keep their transgressions secret.’

‘Does your business take you to Shadowclock, Harry?’ asked the grasper. ‘I can ferry you as far south as the navigation at Ewehead. After that you need special papers to use the mining waterways.’

‘I need to make a stop in Turnhouse on the way. When that’s done, if you can get us to the county boundary at Medfolk, I’ll take us the rest of the way to Shadowclock on foot.’

‘Harry,’ said the grasper, ‘do you really want to go to Shadowclock? The citadel to the north is the largest RAN fortress in Jackals – our old friends might recognize you. And if the navy don’t do for you, you’ve got the mining police, the regular army and a garrison of the Special Guard.’

‘Jackals knows how to protect its monopoly on celgas, Armiral. Even from me.’

‘So be it,’ say the grasper. ‘You really do like to live dangerously, Harry Stave.’

‘If you’re not living on the edge you’re taking up too much space, old stick.’ Harry saw Oliver’s face. ‘Don’t worry, lad. After what we’ve been through, a trip to see the celgas mines is going to be a walk in the park.’

Monitor Eighty-one was not expecting to have her duty interrupted in the monitorarium, but she could tell by the way the other monitors had silently cleared a space for the newcomer – busy finding things to do at the far end of the gantry – that the interloper had rank.

‘Monitor Eighty-one?’

The monitor nodded. Something inside her, a prudent voice of caution, stopped Eighty-one from asking the newcomer why her skin-tight black leather airsuit was bereft of Court insignia, except for a thin yellow stripe running down each trouser leg.

‘I’m interested in your report from Lightshire, Eighty-one. The Hundred Locks incident.’

‘Passed to analyst level, now, ma’am,’ said the monitor.

‘Of course,’ said the visitor. ‘Nevertheless, I would value your raw impression of events.’

Eighty-one was about to reply when she saw the regulator nervously waiting by the entrance to the great monitorarium – a level green. And they only waited on one person. It was her. All the refectory gossip tided over Eighty-one.

She was a lover of Isambard Kirkhill. She was over six-hundred years old. She was a weather witch holding the Court of the Air fixed in the troposphere by the power of her mind alone. She was a leaaf addict. She was a failed revolutionary. She was a shape switcher, rogue fey escaped from Hawklam Asylum. She was … standing in front of her; and she was Lady Riddle. Advocate General. Head of the Court of the Air. There was no doubt about that.

‘Go on,’ said Lady Riddle.

‘It was the morning,’ said Eighty-one. ‘My normal surveillant was off-shift after his telescope had been withdrawn for maintenance.’

‘Is that usual?’ asked Lady Riddle. ‘To withdraw both a telescope and a surveillant midway through an observation?’

Eighty-one thought before answering, a bead of sweat tickling her eyebrow despite the cold in the massive monitorarium sphere. ‘It’s not against protocol, ma’am.’

‘No,’ agreed Lady Riddle. ‘Not against that. And what was the report of the reserve surveillant using the spare telescope from the floating pool?’

‘It appears our own wolftaker terminated the local whistler station, then attempted to murder the extraction team and seize their aerosphere. The wolftaker in question has now disappeared. Four surveillants are currently on a high-sweep of the Hundred Locks area.’

‘The wolftaker in question is Harry Stave,’ said Lady Riddle. ‘And good hunting to you because you’ll be on high-sweep for the rest of the year.’

‘Oh,’ said Eighty-one regretting the inanity even as it escaped her lips.

‘If you were to flag one element of the extraction, which one would it be?’

Eighty-one sweated under her grey greatcoat. Symbolic logic had been her weakest subject when she was being broken in. ‘That the usual pilot on the mission was switched to a different roster.’

‘Law of coincidence?’ asked Lady Riddle.

‘Patterns beat coincidences, ma’am.’

‘So they do,’ said Lady Riddle. ‘Most people would have said the most significant thing in that file was Harry Stave reverting to type.’

‘But I am relatively new to all this,’ said Eighty-one. ‘And perhaps a little slow.’

Lady Riddle’s dark southmoor eyes narrowed. ‘Far from it. Do me a small favour, my dear. When your colleagues ask what I was talking to you about, tell them it was about the Quatérshift border observation.’

That was a small favour it would be dangerous to withhold. Eighty-one nodded, but Lady Riddle had already turned and was heading for the regulator-green by the monitorarium entrance. The game, as her old Court instructor used to say, was afoot, and the open space of the monitorarium felt even more frosty than usual.

Chapter Eight (#u22f8491e-6dae-51e5-80ea-2e737e87817c)

Silver Onestack’s lodgings in Grimhope were a set of small rooms above a workshop where Onestack had a trade mending whatever mechanisms and gewgaws came his way. ‘They practically expect me to cannibalise my own body parts to fix their junk,’ was the only comment Onestack had to make on his outlaw patrons.

Molly remarked on how few people had been on the streets of Grimhope, while those that were out seemed oddly subdued. But Onestack just muttered, ‘You will see, Molly softbody, you will see.’

For the next seven days Onestack kept Molly in his workshop, asking her to observe the people who came in, to acclima tize her to the customs and mores of the undercity before braving its streets. Slowcogs, too, for the steamman appeared reluctant to share knowledge through a crystal link as he had done with the controller back in Guardian Rathbone station. Onestack’s status as a desecration made him unclean to his people in many ways, it appeared. Slowcogs gave no visible offence, but the steamman’s attitude to his unfortunate brother was obvious by the way he spent as much time as possible in any room where Onestack was not, obsessively cleaning the floor and surfaces of the workshop rooms, until there could have been no cleaner habitation in all of Grimhope.

There was a nervousness to Onestack’s clientele, as if they hoped not to stick out from the crowd. It was the same beaten look Molly had seen in the eyes of some of the weaker poorhouse children. The ones who had been broken by their circumstances. The urge to fit in, to fade away into the background dance of Middlesteel’s streets, becoming an invisible breathing spectre, beyond detection, beyond observation and the pain of punishment tasks, ridicule and anguish. Grimhope – the city of outlaws, freedom and wild revelry – had become the city of subdued toil, where no one looked you in the eye for fear of being detected and singled out.

Even confined within Onestack’s lodgings, the noise and smell of Grimhope was ceaseless. The clatter of the manufactories, the smack of punching and cutting machines, the thump of the forest of pipes sucking the smoke away to spew it out in the lower cavern levels. Slowcogs dearly wanted to investigate the nearest mill to discover the nature of their incessant labours, but the cautious Onestack forbade him from leaving the shop; pointing to the gang of chained mill labourers who were sometimes marched down the streets, heads bent under their green cloaks. Soldiers in red cloaks, the new regime’s enforcers – nicknamed ‘the brilliant men’ by Grimhope’s citizens – guarded them.

Molly helped in the shop, surprising Silver Onestack by her natural grasp of mechanisms and gadgetry.

‘You were never apprenticed to a mechomancer, Molly soft-body?’ the steamman asked.

Molly laughed. ‘In Middlesteel, families pay a master for their children to be apprenticed to a good trade, Silver Onestack. They don’t take the sweepings from the workhouse.’

‘Would that the mechomancers had proved so discrimin ating when it comes to experimenting on my own people, Molly softbody.’

Molly had not previously broached Onestack’s status as steamman unclean – a desecration. Taking Slowcogs’ lead she had ignored it, for fear of breaking some taboo of the metal race. ‘Is that why you live down here?’