The Court of the Air

Wildrake shook his head and with a small jump, grabbed hold of one of the message ducts running across the ceiling. He began to do chin lifts on the pipe, the ripples of his muscles raw agony after his morning workout.

Lady Riddle swore to herself. His addiction to the damn drug was getting worse. ‘How much shine are you taking now, Wildrake?’

‘Just enough to keep me hard,’ said Wildrake. ‘To keep me solid. Talk to your sawbones in pharmacology, they keep me supplied.’

There was theoretically no upper limit to how much muscle an abuser could put on while chewing shine, the drug obtained from guard units of the city-states, where whole elite regiments warped themselves into living bull-women.

‘Tell me about the RAN Bellerophon, Wildrake.’

Lord Wildrake talked quickly, trying to get each sentence out between the blaze of pain in his arms. ‘I tracked down what was left of her to the dunes outside Dazbah under their camouflage nets. Full marks to the analysts involved for that prediction.’

‘Go on,’ said Lady Riddle.

‘One of the officers had been turned; they were holding his family prisoner and blackmailed him into putting the airship off course. Then he arranged for it to land on the other side of the Cassarabian border with a buoyancy leak. The local tribesmen took it from there.’

‘Our cloudies?’

‘Most of them were poisoned by something the traitor had put in their grog ration. I managed to free a couple of the survivors. The women in the crew had already been passed to the caliph’s biologick breeders by the time I arrived, I fear to say.’

‘Too bold,’ said Lady Riddle. ‘They are becoming far too bold. Something will need to be done about Cassarabia before long.’

‘The airship’s celgas has been siphoned off to a facility outside Dazbah,’ said Lord Wildrake. ‘They were using the wombs of our female ratings to try to witch up an organic substitute for celgas.’

‘The surveillant watch said you destroyed the place.’

‘They haven’t made any more progress on making their airship gas less flammable,’ said Wildrake. ‘You might say I just turned up the heat on the situation.’

‘If they don’t like it, they should have stayed out of our kitchen, Wildrake.’

‘My thoughts exactly, Advocate General.’

‘Now that the caliph has had his fingers burnt, I have a new job for you, Wildrake.’

‘I thought you might.’ Wildrake’s skin had taken on a healthy red sheen, the shine-induced sweat filling the room with a scent like cinnamon. ‘Another one of our airships is missing?’

‘Not an airship,’ said Lady Riddle. ‘A man. Wolf Twelve has gone rogue.’

‘Harold?’ said Wildrake, allowing his body to hang from the message duct for a minute. ‘Well, well. Naughty old Harold Stave. So it’s set a wolftaker to catch a wolftaker.’

‘Precisely,’ said Lady Riddle. ‘I understand you have some history with him, beyond your naval service, I mean. Will that be a problem?’

‘Moving barrels of ballast water around Jackals doesn’t exactly count as naval service in my estimation, ma’am,’ said Lord Wildrake.

‘But of all those captured it was only yourself and Harry Stave who survived the camp at Flavstar,’ Lady Riddle pointed out. ‘Along with that rich boy, the freelancer.’

‘Six months’ hospitality courtesy of the Commonshare’s Committee of Public Security took its toll on the team. It was something of a miracle any of us lived through it.’

Lady Riddle sat back. It was after his time in the camp that Wildrake had started taking shine. Bulking up; as if the wolf-taker could swell his muscles large enough that no Commonshare torturer could ever reach him again. ‘After your escape, I recall there was a difference of opinion as to whose error led to the operation in Quatérshift being rolled up.’

‘No doubt in my mind as to whose fault it was, Advocate General. Harold Stave is a chancer, an accident waiting to happen. Not a gentleman at all.’

‘The latter may be true, but given the wake of destruction you leave behind you, Wildrake, I hardly think you are in a position to lecture.’

Wildrake gasped with the pain of the exercise. ‘I suspect, ma’am, it may be my previous disagreement with Wolf Twelve that has led you to drop this proposition into my lap. Consider myself stimulated. The circumstances will make for a rather interesting hunt.’

‘You have the field then,’ said Lady Riddle. ‘And Wildrake …’

‘Ma’am?’

‘Enough of him back alive to be interrogated by one of our truth hexers, if you please.’

‘Best efforts, Advocate General,’ said Wildrake, dropping to the floor, feeling the glorious pain in his aching arms. ‘Best efforts.’

Oliver stood in the cobbled streets outside Bonegate prison, the crowds lining up by the thousand to see him hang. Hawkers were selling trays of rotten fruit, some of which was already lashing past the scaffold. It was normally considered more fun to let the condemned prisoners feel the drop, then pelt them with garbage as they danced the Bonegate quadrille.

Inspector Pullinger raised his hands and a hush fell over the expectant mob. ‘For breaking of a crown registration order, for breach of registration boundary lines, for failure to submit to the Department of Feymist’s articles under statute six of the Feybreed Control Act, for the most foul deed of premeditated murder on three counts, Oliver Brooks is sentenced to death by hanging.’

The crowd cheered and clapped as a Circlist vicar stepped forward to administer the rites of conversion. She spoke the litany quietly, so that only Oliver and the others on the gallows platform could hear the words. ‘Troubled souls in this life, may your essence return to the one sea of consciousness, so that as the Circle turns, you are returned to this good earth in a happier vessel.’

The vicar spun in horror as the misshapen form of the Whisperer pulled himself up onto the gallows. ‘New vessel? Nothing wrong with the old one.’

Guards were running away screaming, the crowd falling back in a stampede.

‘See, wherever I want to sit, I can always find a space.’

‘Whisperer,’ Oliver groaned.

‘Stress dreams, Oliver?’ said the Whisperer. ‘I can go closer to home for them. Always someone new being introduced back at my place. Worldsinger guards with their funny ways and their scalpels, potions and rubber gloves.’

Oliver struggled to untie the noose around his neck. ‘Thank the Circle, I thought this was real. I really did.’

‘A little realer every day, Oliver,’ hissed the Whisperer. ‘If they catch you, this is your future. A cell next to mine buried under the earth in Hawklam is the premium option for you now. I warned you about Harry Stave, did I not?’

‘My family’s dead, Whisperer. They killed my uncle. Killed Damson Griggs. They tried to kill me too.’

The Whisperer stroked Oliver’s back as he sliced the dream noose with a bony appendage, part teeth and part arm-bone. ‘See how similar we’re becoming, Oliver. My family died too. My father strangled my mother for giving birth to me, and I haunted his putrid dreams until he climbed a windmill at Hazlebank and threw himself off it.’

‘You’re mad,’ said Oliver. ‘We’re nothing alike.’

‘You think I am mad?’ hissed the Whisperer, giggling. ‘You should see the things they’re releasing from the asylum, Oliver. Soul-sniffers. Special torcs to contain them – more like suits of armour than torcs. In the asylum we used to call them the wild bunch, and wild they are.’

Oliver looked out over Bonegate Square. It was empty now. ‘What are you doing here, Whisperer?’

‘So little gratitude, Oliver. I am taking care of business. For the both of us. A dream here, a dream there, not just the fey either – normals too.’

Oliver tried to avoid looking directly at the misshapen thing. ‘I didn’t know you could do that.’

‘The feymist curtain has been in Jackals for over a thousand years, Oliver. Seeping its essence into the fields and the moors and the forests. The worldsingers won’t admit it, but there’s a bit of fey in all of us now.’ He laughed. ‘More in some than others though, eh?’