The Court of the Air

The lady smiled. ‘I think after a year with me our young lady’s tastes will be expensive enough that she won’t wish to return to working for your Handsome Lane concerns.’

Molly followed her new employer out onto the street, leaving the dank Sun Gate workhouse to the Beadle and his minions. The lady had a private cab waiting for her, the horses and carriage as jet-black as the livery of the squat, bullet-headed retainer standing beside them.

‘Damson Fairborn,’ Molly coughed politely as the manservant swung open the cab door.

‘Yes, my dear.’

Molly indicated the high prison-like walls of the poorhouse behind them. ‘This isn’t the usual recruiting ground for a domestic’

Her new employer looked surprised. ‘Why, Molly, I don’t intend you for an undermaid or a scullery girl. I thought you might have recognized my name.’

‘Your name?’

‘Lady Fairborn, Molly. As in my establishment: Fairborn and Jarndyce.’

Molly’s blood turned cold.

‘Of course,’ the lady winked at her heavily muscled retainer, ‘Lord Jarndyce is sadly no longer with us. Isn’t that so, Alfred?’

‘A right shame, milady,’ replied the retainer. ‘Choked on a piece of lobster shell during supper, it was said.’

‘Yes, Alfred. That was really rather careless of him. One of the very few occurrences of good living proving harmful to one’s constitution, I should imagine.’

Molly’s eyes were still wide with shock. ‘But Fairborn and Jarndyce is—’

‘A bawdyhouse, my dear. And I, not to place too delicate a sensibility on it, am widely known as the Queen of the Whores.’

The retainer stepped behind Molly, cutting off her escape route down the street.

‘And you, Molly. I think you shall do very nicely indeed as one of my girls.’

Back in the Beadle’s office the Observer faded into the reality of the poorhouse. She was allowed only one intervention, and it had been one of her best. Small. As it had to be. Hardly an intercession at all.

Originally the Beadle had been intending to rent Molly’s ward papers to the large abattoir over on Cringly Corner; but that reality path would have seen Molly returned, dismissed for insubordination, and back in the poorhouse within six weeks. Which would not have been at all beneficial for the Observer and her designs.

It had been so easy to nudge the Beadle’s brain a degree to the side, letting the new plan form in his imagination. Harder to push Emma Fairborn’s steel trap of a mind, but still well within the Observer’s intervention tolerances. The Beadle was sitting behind his desk now, working out how much graft was due in by the end of the week.

The Observer made sure everything was tidy and accounted for in the man’s treacle-thick chemical soup of a mind. Something, a sixth sense perhaps, made the Beadle scratch the nape of his neck and stare directly at where the Observer was standing. She increased the strength of her infiltration of his optic nerve, erasing even her background presence, comforting the small monkey brain back into a state of ease. Silver and gold, think about the money. The Beadle shuffled his papers into a neat stack and locked them away in his drawer. It was going to be a good take again this week.

The Observer sighed and faded back out of reality. Sadly, the Beadle was not going to live long enough to purchase that twelfth cottage by the coast to add to his burgeoning property empire. She could have saved him. But then there were some interventions the Observer was glad she was not required to make.

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

The aerostat field at Hundred Locks was slowly filling up with passengers awaiting the Lady Hawklight’s arrival. Oliver checked his trouser pocket. The description of his uncle’s guest still lay crumpled in there.

‘Oliver.’ A voice diverted his attention away from his uncle’s errand – Thaddius. A boy he had known from school. When Oliver had still been allowed to attend school, of course.

In the way of the young everywhere, the lad’s nickname was Slim, because he was anything but. The portly Thaddius had about as many friends in Hundred Locks as Oliver. At least, as many friends as Oliver had been left with, after the word had spread about what he really was … or might become.

‘Tail spotting?’ asked Oliver.

‘Tail spotting,’ confirmed Thaddius, his portly cheeks spreading in a grin. He showed Oliver his open book, neatly criss-crossed by a pencilled grid. ‘See, I got the Lady Darkmoor’s tail code last week. She normally operates on the Medfolk-to-Calgness run, but the merchant fleet are introducing the new Guardian Cunningham class in the south, so some of the uplander airships are being reallocated here now.’

Oliver nodded out of politeness. Thaddius was desperate to join the Royal Aerostatical Navy but his family had too little money to purchase him a commission, and just a little too much to countenance him ever signing up as a humble jack cloudie. Poor fat Thaddius was going to follow the family trade and become a butcher with his father and brothers, spending his evenings at the field, wistfully watching the graceful airship hulls sailing in and out. Dreaming of what might have been. And soon too. There were only three months to go before Thaddius and his classmates left the gates of the local state school for the last time.

‘Fieldsmen to the line,’ cried one of the green-uniformed airship officers and a burly gang of navvies took position, making a cigar-shaped outline on the grass. A pair of large dray horses walked to the nose of the formation to stand alongside the field’s tractor-like steamman; ready to provide the heavy muscle. The steamman hardly looked up to the job. His name was Rustpivot, and he had been a worker at the field when Oliver’s Uncle Titus was a boy. As large as two wagons, his boiler belly was bordered by six spiked wheels. Despite his advanced years, the steamman could still reach out with any of his four arms to tow an aerostat back into lift position.

‘Those with passage booked, please make sure you have your tickets to hand,’ called an official.

Oliver sighed. Travel.

Thaddius looked at him and read his mind. ‘They can’t keep you registered forever, Oliver. They’ve either got to pass you, or, well, you know…’ his voice trailed off.

‘They’re never going to pass me,’ Oliver spat. ‘They enjoy keeping me prisoner here too much.’

Thaddius fell quiet. The woes of his approaching family apprenticeship were put into perspective for him, set against the alternative prospects faced by his companion on the airship field. Remaining an outcast. Marked out. Gossiped about. Unable to travel further than was allowed by the state’s requirement that he sign on every week. Thaddius gave him a long look of sympathy, then left for the airship hangar to join the gang of tail spotters waiting by the doors.

From the south the wheezing heave and fall of a quartet of expansion engines hushed the noise of the waiting crowd. The airship rose out of the forest behind the field, the top half of her hull painted merchantman green, the bottom half a bright checkerboard of yellow and black squares.

The Lady Hawklight dipped her nose and sailors threw open hatches along the side of the gondola, casting down lines weighted with lead heads towards the ground. The fieldsmen caught these and the airship’s massive envelope was dragged towards the docking tower, the aerostat’s nose pulled with a loud hollow clank into her capture ring. Now she was fixed, the lines from the aerostat were wound into pulleys and the airship was drawn down to her hover-side position ten feet above the field.

The docking tower sat on a single iron rail. If the airship’s plan of flight included a berth for the night, both tower and ship would eventually be drawn back into the hangar at the far end of the field where Thaddius and the other children eagerly waited. Disembarkation stairs were pushed up to the gondola doors and wagons carrying ballast water and precious cylinders of celgas drew up on her starboard side.

The usual pool of passengers with business in Hundred Locks began to disembark. Half the travellers were foreigners from outside the Kingdom of Jackals, the white togas from the city-states of the Catosian League clashing with the brightly multicoloured ponchos of the Holy Kikkosico Empire. Neither country allowed Jackelian airships to overfly their lands, suspicious of the Kingdom’s monopoly on air travel and the opportunities for reconnaissance it provided. The foreigners would travel by canal navigation to the head of Toby Fall Rise, and from there return home by schooner and ferry across the Sepia Sea.

There were archaeologists in the group too, from one of the eight great universities, easily conspicuous by the leather cases they carried, filled with fine tools that they would not want to risk to the movements and shifts of the cargo hold. They were still arguing over whether the colossal dike that overshadowed the town was a natural freak of nature or some feat of an ancient civilisation.

Oliver put his hands into his pockets for warmth, and finding the note, suddenly remembered the reason for his visit to the aerostat field. His uncle’s guest!

Most of the arrivals had already dispersed. The queue of passengers boarding the Lady Hawklight thinned to a few late arrivals. Out on the field the local boys had set up a game of four-poles, the amateur fast-bowling watched with amused detachment by the officers from the aerostat as they waited for the airship to take on her full load of celgas and ballast water.

A peddler was hawking to the remaining passengers from the Holy Kikkosico Empire, a smoke-filled glass bottle hanging on his chest, offering six breaths of mumblesmoke for a ha’penny. The ranks of barouche-and-fours had emptied too, the small horse-drawn coaches taking any willing travellers through the small crowded town and up to the Hundred Locks canal navigation from which the settlement took its name.

Among the stragglers stood one man who fitted the crumpled description Oliver’s uncle had dashed out that morning from his desk. He was thin, a touch under Oliver’s height of six foot, and also possessed a shock of dark blond hair cut short and ragged. What the description had omitted were the dark iron glasses that rested across the bridge of his nose. Cheap milled fare, they had never graced the exclusive shelves of any optician back in the capital.

Oliver was well used to guiding visitors from the field and across to his uncle’s home at Seventy Star Hall, but they were normally well-to-do merchants like Titus Brooks himself. His warehouse in Shipman Town swelled with barrels of empire wine, city-state contraptions and – it was rumoured – brandy still smuggled through Quatérshift, a trade legal for hundreds of years but now forbidden in both Quatérshift and Jackals since the end of the Two-Year War.

The man Oliver was staring at looked more like the cheaply dressed clerk of a parish council. Oliver walked over to him. ‘Mister Stave?’

‘Harry,’ said the man, extending his hand to Oliver. ‘Harry Stave. The last time I was called mister anything was—’ he looked at Oliver and thought better of the tale ‘—well, a long time ago, let’s say. Just call me Harry.’

‘My uncle is expecting you, Harry.’ Oliver pointed towards the town.

‘I don’t doubt he is, old stick. But my luggage, such as it is, is still coming off the Lady Hawklight.’

A cushion of hemp netting was assembled underneath the gondola’s cargo hatch, set up to take the royal mail sacks, scarlet with their KoJ seal, a lion resting underneath the portcullis of the House of Guardians. A steamman was pulling a trolley away from the airship’s shadow, piled high with crates, packages and travel chests.

‘You’re not exactly travelling light.’