The Court of the Air

Harry placed a hand on Mother’s shoulder. ‘Mother, you’re an artist.’

‘I aim to please, Harold Stave. Now dearie, a curio for the son of Phileas Brooks.’ Mother stood up and unlocked a drawer on the floor of the caravan. Removing a cloth bundle tied in string, she unwrapped a blunt-looking knife with a dull black handle. It was unremarkable in every way except for an image of a boar’s head carved into its end. ‘Your father gave this to me as a payment, a while before his aerostat went down. Never did have the heart to sell it after that.’

Oliver felt the heft of the knife. It was unnaturally light, like holding air. ‘Thank you, Damson Loade. Why would my father have used this though?’

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ the old lady chuckled. ‘Wouldn’t cut the string on its wrapping. Pass it back.’

Oliver gave the gunsmith the knife. She took out a heavy block of lead for casting balls, twisted the head of the pommel and pushed the blade through the lead slab like it was soft Fromerset cheese. Clicking the boar’s head back into place she laid the knife back on the workbench. ‘Phileas got it on one of the continents out east, a hex-blade, folded into shape by whatever passes for worldsinger sorcery out there. Your father could make the blade do things too, change its form and become a sabre or an axe – I never did work out how.’

‘As ordinary-seeming as a tanner’s knife and as deadly as a slipsharp,’ said Harry in admiration. ‘The perfect wolftaker’s weapon.’

‘I really don’t have any money to pay for this,’ Oliver said.

‘There’s debts other than those that run to coin,’ said Mother, passing Harry a bag of crystal charges. ‘And I seem to be repaying most of them today. You need any more supplies?’

‘Just enough food to get to Shadowclock,’ said Harry.

‘Shadowclock! Of course,’ Mother tutted. ‘When you’ve got the crushers in front of you and the wolves of the Court behind you, where better? The most heavily guarded city in the whole of Jackals.’

Harry tucked his pistol under his coat. ‘I think it was you who once told me the best place to hide is in the shadow of a police station.’

‘Harry dearie, I also spent ten years of my life swapping those same stories with transportees while I was digging out irrigation channels for tenant farmers in the colonies. From here on in, you’re not going to find any more whistlers damn fool enough to get themselves disavowed for your sins.’

‘You’re a saint, Mother.’

‘Listen boy, I’d like at least one of the old crew alive enough to put flowers on my grave when I’m under the soil.’

‘Mother, you’re going to live forever.’

The old gun maker took a generous swig from her jinn bottle. ‘No. But ever since my doctor got me off my mumble-weed pipe, it sure feels that way.’

The crystalgrid clerk looked annoyed that someone had arrived at the front desk just as the station was about to go over to its night shift. ‘We’re closed to the public. Priority state traffic only now. Unless you have a permit you’ll need to come back in the morning.’

‘Oh, sir, I have, you know,’ said the customer. He produced a police inspector’s badge from inside his coat, as shiny as it was false. ‘You’re not going to go off right now, are you sir?’

Resigned, the clerk pulled out a pencil and a message slip. ‘It is late, you know. We sent off all the Turnhouse station dispatches four hours ago.’

‘I would have come earlier, sir, but I had to wait for my mother to fall asleep.’

As the latecomer filled out the message slip, the clerk glanced back into the transmission hall. Some of the day shift’s blue-skinned senders were already going into their hibernation cycle in front of the daughter crystals.

Reading the message, the clerk looked up. ‘You know that state traffic is sent free – you don’t have to pay tuppence for each word. You can write more if you want…’

‘Oh no, sir. Length isn’t important to me.’

The odd fellow left and the desk clerk pressed the bell for a transcriber. Seconds later a woman poked her head through the door.

‘Late one, Ada,’ said the man. ‘Flash traffic.’

The transcriber read the message on the slip of paper. ‘Wolf twelve. Shadowclock. What in Circle’s name am I meant to do with that?’

‘I reckon it’s a tip for a horse at tomorrow’s races,’ said the clerk. ‘Bloke who passed it in was police. The blooming crushers are having a laugh. Just code it and pass it down the line.’

‘Do you see what he’s written under destination – it’s not a town, it’s a crystal node.’ She passed back the slip the customer had scribbled on.

‘What?’ The clerk read back the sequence of numbers. ‘So it is. Not a mother crystal I recognize, either; do you, Ada? Maybe the crusher worked on the crystalgrid before he became a policeman.’

‘The mother crystal won’t be in any of the blue books we’ve got here,’ the transcriber sighed. ‘I don’t even think the inheritance check is validly formed. Look, I don’t get paid night rates. I need to get home. I’m just going to send the message down the line exactly as it is; someone on the grid will know what to do with it.’

Someone did.

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

It had taken two hours for the mob outside the royal palace to gather to its full strength and reach the maximum intensity of its natural curve into violence. Now they were finally boiling over. The chants had reached a self-righteous zenith. The lack of response from the thin line of black-uniformed police behind the palace rails, nervously clutching their cutlasses, was making the crowd bolder still. Bold enough to ignore the occasional tripod-mounted grasshopper cannon loaded with gravel and grapeshot, standing behind the police line.

‘We’re trying to get a magistrate to read the riot act,’ said a police major to Captain Flare. ‘But she’s stuck behind the barricades that have been raised in Gad’s Hill.’

‘No doubt wedged alongside the heavies,’ Flare said.

The major looked miserably out across Palace Square. There were none of the craynarbian Heavy Brigade reinforcements from the Echo Street station he had sent for. Let alone the exomounts from the stables behind Ham Yard.

‘It’s deuced busy out there on the streets,’ said the major. ‘The dockworkers’ combination withdrew their labour early this morning and the port owners tried to lock them out. Half of the Gambleflowers is up in flames.’

Flare nodded. From the fourth-storey palace window he could already see the storm front brewing. The order of worldsinger’s weather witches had been called in to put out Middlesteel’s blazing warehouse district. Heavy black clouds were gathering along the river.

‘Will you open up on them?’ asked Flare.

‘They haven’t broken through the railings yet,’ said the police major. ‘We’ll hold our fire.’

Of course he would. It might well be the major’s head on a pole that was called for on the floor of the House of Guardians if the protest in Palace Square turned into a bloodbath. ‘Did somebody say fire?’ Flare’s two lieutenants in the Special Guard had arrived from the palace barracks along with their worldsinger minder, a four-flower bureaucrat.

‘Bonefire, Hardfall.’ Flare pointedly ignored the order’s man.

‘Have we got the nod yet to put this down?’ asked Bonefire.

‘The House of Guardians isn’t in session,’ said Flare. ‘I sent Cloudsplitter off half an hour ago to locate the First Guardian and secure a cabinet order. If you can find a doomsman out there hiding under a magistrate’s bench, please do get them to read the riot act.’

Bonefire gazed out of the throne room’s tall windows. ‘Look at them down there. The face of reason, the heart of democracy. Bloody hamblins.’

Flare grimaced. He did not like his people using guard argot around the palace. Hamblin Normal was an upland village in Drochney outside the feymist curtain; where a waterfall was rumoured to have the power to cure the fey. Hundreds of families made their pilgrimage there each day, to take the waters and ward off any exposure to the body-warping mist they imagined might have occurred. Flare had always suspected it was a tale concocted by the worldsingers to allow them to net potential feybreed.