THE COURT OF THE AIR

STEPHEN HUNT

Thanks where thanks are due. You know who you are.

Contents

Title Page Dedication Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six About the Author Copyright About the Publisher

Chapter One

Molly Templar sat dejected by the loading platform of the Handsome Lane laundry. An empty cart bore testament to the full tub of clothes inside, bubbling away. At least Molly tried to imagine what dejected would feel like, and scrunched her freckled face to match the mood. In the end though, it was one of the other poorhouse girls, Rachael, who came to fetch her, not the Beadle, so Molly’s player-like mastery of ‘dejected’ went unappreciated.

Damson Snell, the mistress of the laundry, came out to see who had turned up, and looked disappointed that it was just another Sun Gate workhouse girl. ‘The Beadle too busy to see the quality of the idle scruffs he’s forcing on my business, then?’

‘His apologies, miss,’ said Rachael. ‘He is otherwise engaged.’

‘Well, you tell him from me, I got no room for workers as slack as this one.’ Snell pointed to Molly. ‘You know what I caught her doing?’

‘No miss.’ Although Rachael’s tone suggested she might have an inkling.

‘Reading!’ Damson Snell’s face went red with incredulity. ‘Some gent had left a thruppence novel in the pocket of his coat and she—’ her finger stabbed at Molly ‘—was only bloody reading it. And when I bangs her one, she cheeks me back. A fine little madam and no mistake. You tell the Beadle we runs a place of work here, not a library. When we wants a lady of letters, I’ll send for an articled clerk, not some Sun Gate scruff.’

Rachael nodded with her best impression of contrite understanding and led Molly away before the laundry owner could extend her tirade.

‘A fine lesson in business from her,’ said Molly, when they were out of earshot. ‘She who slips the Beadle twenty shillings a month and gets her labour free from the poorhouse. Her lesson in economics forgot to include a fair wage for those who have nothing to sell but their labour.’

Rachael sighed. ‘You’re turning into a right little Carlist, Molly. I’m surprised you weren’t turned out for trying to organize a worker’s combination. That thruppence novel in the gent’s pocket wasn’t a copy of Community and the Commons, was it?’

‘From one of her customers?’ Molly snorted. ‘No, it was a naval tale. The jolly aerostat Affray and its hunt for the submarine pirate Samson Dark.’

Rachael nodded. The Kingdom of Jackals was awash with writers from the publishing concerns along Dock Yard, sniffing out heroes, bandits, highwaymen and privateers to fill the pages of pocket news sheets like The Middlesteel Illustrated News and the cheap penny dreadfuls, fact and fiction blended into cut-price serials to hook the readers. The more imaginative stories even plundered legend, culling gods from the dark days before the citizens of Jackals embraced the Circlist meditations; writing devils like the wolftakers onto the pages of their tales, fiends sent to kidnap the wicked and terrify the immoral with their black cloaks and sharp teeth.

Viewed from the workhouse, the stories were bright distractions, an impossible distance from the children’s lives of grind and hunger. Molly wanted those stories to be true, that if only somewhere there might be bright ballrooms and handsome officers on prancing horses. But the hard-bitten streak of realism in her realized that Samson Dark had probably been a violent old soak, with a murderous temper and a taste for cargoes he was too lazy, idle and stupid to earn himself. Far from fighting a glorious battle, the jolly airship Affray had probably blundered across the pirate fleet feeding innocent sailors to the fish, then held position over Dark’s underwater vessel while they tumbled fire-fins into her masts and deck, leaving the burning pirates to the mercy of the ocean and the slipsharps. Days later some hack from Dock Yard would have chanced across the drunken aerostat crew in a tavern, and for the price of a keg of blackstrap, teased out an embellished tale of glory and handto-hand combat. Then the hack would have further embroidered the yarn for his editors on the penny dreadfuls and Dock Street imprints like the Torley Smith press.

‘Have I been blown to the Beadle yet?’ asked Molly, her concerns returning to the present.

‘As if you wouldn’t have been,’ said Rachael. ‘Though not by me – I’m no blower. This is the fourth job you’ve been chucked from in as many months. He was going to find out somehow.’

Molly teased her red hair nervously. ‘Was the Beadle angry?’

‘That’s one word for it.’

‘Well, what can he do?’ asked Molly.

‘You’re a fool, Molly Templar,’ said her companion, seeing the flash of defiance in Molly’s eyes. ‘What haven’t they done to you? The strap? Administrative punishment, more days on than off? Short rations? And still you ask for more.’

‘I’m out of it soon enough.’

‘You’ve still got a year to go before your ward papers expire and you get the vote,’ said Rachael. ‘That’s a long time to have the Beadle pissed off at you.’

‘One more year, then I’m out of here.’

‘To what?’ asked Rachael. ‘You think an orphan scruff like you or me is going to end up nobbing it up in grand society? Being waited on with partridge pie and the finest claret? You don’t settle to a living soon and you’ll end up running with the flash mob on the street, dipping wallets, then the crushers will have you and it’ll be a transportation hulk to the Concorzian colonies for our young Damson Molly Templar.’

‘I don’t want to end up back there.’ Molly flipped a thumb in the direction of the Handsome Lane laundry.

‘Nobody wants to end up there, Molly girl. But if it puts food in your tummy and a roof over your head, it’s better than starving.’

‘Well, I’m being starved by a gradual process in the poorhouse, or by a quick one out of it,’ said Molly. ‘If only …’

Rachael took Molly’s hand. ‘I know. I miss the damson too. And if wishes were shillings we’d all be living like princesses.’

There was only one damson for the orphans. Damson Darnay had been the head of the Sun Gate poorhouse before the Beadle; four years now since her heart attack. A reformer, she had argued that the rich financial district of Middlesteel could afford a model poorhouse on its doorstep. A house where the children were taught to read and write, where the mindless make-work of the poorhouse was replaced by an education and a good Circlist upbringing.

It was a vicar from the Circlean church who had taken away her shroud-wrapped body on the back of a wagon one cold morning, and the Beadle who turned up to take her place. In the pocket of the local merchants, the cost of their keep was now defrayed by placement in local businesses. Ward apprenticeships to prepare the grateful orphans for their necessary adult living.

It was strange how the children’s placements never included perching behind a warm desk in one of the fancy new pneumatic buildings along Gate Street, or an articled clerk’s position along Sun Lane. Sewer-scrapers, yes. Laundry jobs that would see your nails fall out from constant dipping in chemical bleach. Positions in dimly lit workshops and mill works, hunched over a loom or cutting engine, splashed by metal and losing a finger a year.

Small for her age, Molly had spent her own twelfth and thirteenth years as a vent girl, climbing the dark airshafts of the Middlesteel pneumatics with a brush, unclogging the dust and stack smoke. That was before the Blimber Watts tower breach. Fifty storeys high, Blimber Watts had been a pioneering design for its time, able to house thousands of clerks, marble atriums and even a sun garden inside its rubberized and canvas skin. But the draughtsmen had got the stress calculations wrong and the water walls had burst, sending the pneumatic structure tumbling down into the clogged streets.

Molly had been in the vents on the thirty-eighth floor when the tower lost cohesion, coming down even faster than it had gone up. Clawing in darkness at the deflating walls as her stomach turned in freefall; a smashing impact, then lying trapped for five days between two leaking water cells, licking at the walls for the stale, dirty liquid. Throwing up in terror, her voice a knife-slicing croak screaming and screaming for help.

She had lost hope of being rescued, lying in the embrace of a pressing crush of rubber. Then she sensed the steamman worker cutting through the building’s remains above her. Molly knew she possessed an unnatural affinity for the mechanical race, the polished boiler hearts and intricate mechanisms of cogs and silicate prisms calling out to her to be examined, turned over in her fingers, assembled into intricate patterns. She had screwed her eyes shut and willed the worker to hear her thoughts – here, here, down HERE.

Minutes later the silent steamman had peeled back a foot-thick strip of rubber, letting a flood of impossibly bright daylight come gushing in. It stood there silently, an iron statue, until Molly noticed its voicebox had been removed. A gentle nod of its head and the steamman was moving off, as if bloodied, blackened girls crawling out of the ground were an everyday occurrence for the creature of the metal.

How the Beadle had cursed and beaten her to try to get her back into the vents. But the only time she had tried, two other vent girls had to be sent in to drag her trembling, mute form out of the passages.

‘Come on,’ said Rachael. ‘Let’s take the turn down Blackglass Lane; they were putting on a march across Grumblebank when I came to fetch you.’

‘The King?’ said Molly.

‘Better than that, girl. The Special Guard.’

Despite the trouble that was waiting for her back at the workhouse for another job lost, Molly smiled. Everyone loved the Special Guard. Their extreme powers. The handsome cut of their uniform. Days spent at the muscle pits to whet the curves of their athletic build.

The two girls cut across a series of old rookeries, bent and puddled with garbage filth, before emerging on one of the broad clean avenues that ran parallel to Sun Street itself. There, a crowd of eager onlookers were thronging the street, a line of crushers from the local police precinct holding the press back, dark bandoleers of gleaming crystal bullets crisscrossed over their black constable’s uniforms.

Back down the thoroughfare a column of the Special Guard moved with their trademark sweeping leg march, high boots whip-cracking on the road in unison. The ground seemed to vibrate with their approach.

‘There’s your guardsmen,’ said Molly.

‘And there’s your king,’ added Rachael.

His Majesty King Julius, eighth monarch of the Throne Restored and King of the Jackelians, sat on a cushioned red seat in an open coach and four, staring sadly back at the curious crowds.

Molly gestured at Crown Prince Alpheus sitting to the king’s side, hardly any older than either of the poorhouse girls. ‘He doesn’t look happy.’

‘Why should he be, when his father’s got the waterman’s sickness? His pappy won’t see out another two years as monarch, then the boy’s for the knife.’

Molly nodded. The King’s robes had been subtly tailored to accentuate the fact that both of his arms had been surgically removed, and in time the young prince would no doubt be dragged bawling to the bone-cutter’s table by his Special Guard jailers.

It had been ever thus, since Isambard Kirkhill strode across the land in a sea of blood and pistol smoke to assert parliament’s right of supremacy at the head of the new pattern army. No monarch shall ever raise his arms against his people again.

Five hundred years since the civil war and the House of Guardians were still adhering to the strictures of Isambard Kirkhill, old sabre-side as his enemies had nicknamed him. There was the weekly march to Parliament Square from the palace – the latter little more than an empty marble jail now. The symbolic unchaining of the king’s iron face-gag, then the king would bend down on one knee and assert the House of Guardians’ right to rule for the people. These days his only witnesses were a few uninterested spectators, a handful of curious foreign visitors and the long line of silent statues of Guardian Electors past.

‘Look,’ said Molly, pointing behind the carriage. ‘Captain Flare.’

Rachael pushed at the costermongers and fish-stall hawkers in front of her to get a better look.

‘It is him. Molly, will you look at those muscles? He could crush a regiment of Cassarabian sand riders between them thighs.’

Molly knew that Rachael favoured the lewder penny dread-fuls, adventures that featured the action between the silks of dune-swept harems as much as the ring of sabre steel across a battlefield. But it was true. The commander of the Special Guard was impossibly handsome. None of the penny dread-fuls’ cover illustrations had ever done him justice. Captain Flare’s cloak drifted behind him like a thing alive, a dancing shadow, his piercing blue eyes sweeping the crowd, making them feel he was staring straight at each of them alone. A flash of light glinted off the captain’s restraining neck torc, blinding Molly for a second.

‘Hooray the Guard!’ An almost hysterical scream from one of the crowd, and as if it were a trigger, the entire multitude took up the shout, cheering and stamping along the broadways. Someone in the crowd started singing ‘Lion of Jackals’ and soon half the avenue had joined in the bawdy patriotic lyrics.

Molly stood next to Rachael, cheering, a swell of pride rising in her chest. Hooray the Guard indeed. Between the Royal Aerostatical Navy ruling the sky and the powerful and heroic Special Guard on the ground, demolishing any enemy that dared to threaten Jackals, the kingdom was the most powerful force on the continent.

Other nations would have used that power to build an empire, bully their neighbours into subservience. But not Jackals. Their people suffered no rule of mad kings, power-hungry caliphs or rapacious senators. The quiet, peaceful Jackelians had pulled the teeth of their own would-be overlords and had prospered for centuries – trading, building, and quietly, doggedly innovating. If a Jackelian had a town garden to potter around in, or a village field to snatch a quick afternoon game of four-poles in, their empire was complete.

Other nations had dictator kings, political assassinations, and the heart-tugging wail of starving children and barren fields lying fallow while peasant armies slaughtered each other at the whim of local warlords. Jackals let its over-ambitious fools argue and wag fingers at each other across the House of Guardians.

Other nations had dark gods and wild-eyed prophets that demanded obedience, child mutilation, slavery, and poverty for the people while wealth flowed to an all-powerful priest class. Jackals had its deity-free Circlist philosophy, gentle meditations and a wide network of oratories. A Circlist parson might drop round and request a quick brew of caffeel, but never call for the beating heart of a family’s firstborn to be ripped out of its chest.

Every few decades a foreign power would mistake the Jackelians’ quiet taste for the rule of law for the absence of ambition. Would mistake a content and isolationist bent for a weak and decadent society. Would come to the conclusion that a nation of shopkeepers might better be put to serving what they had built, made and grown to warriors and bullies. Many enemies had made the assumption that prefers not to fight equates to can’t fight and won’t fight. All had been punished severely for it. Slow to rouse, once they were, their foes dis covered Jackals was no nation full of bumbling storekeepers, greedy mill owners and stupid farm boys. They found a pit of lions, a people with a hard, unruly thuggish streak and no tolerance for bullies – either foreign or raised on Jackals’ own acres. Of course, being the only nation on Earth to possess a supply of celgas had never harmed the kingdom’s standing. Jackals’ unique aerial navy was truly the envy of the world, a floating wall of death standing ready to guarantee her ancient freedoms.

‘Better a knave in Jackals than a prince in Quatérshift’ went the popular drinking song, and right now, caught up in the wild jingoistic crowd, Molly’s heart followed the sentiment. Then she remembered the Beadle waiting for her back at the poorhouse with his stinging cane and her heart briefly sank. Her spirit quickly returned; she found her resolve stiffened as she remembered one of Damson Darnay’s history lessons. Each of them was a gem to be treasured in her now miserable life, but one in particular she recalled with fond clarity, even now, years after the death of the woman who had been like a mother to her.

The lesson had taken the form of a centuries-old letter – a horrified report to the then King of Quatérshift from his ambassador in Jackals, generations before Jackals’ civil war, when most of the continent still suffered under the heel of absolutist regimes. The monarch of the old throne of Jackals had been attending a play at the theatre when the mob took against the performance, booing the actors off the stage, then, noticing the King in the royal box, stoning him too. The stunned Quatérshiftian had described to his own monarch the unbelievable sight of the King’s militia fighting a rearguard action down the street as the rioting mob chased the portly Jackelian ruler away from the burning theatre. How alien to that bewildered ambassador, from a land where compliant serfs would be beaten to death for failing to address a noble with respect. But how true to the Jackelian character.

Molly had taken that lesson to heart. She might be an orphan, brought up by an uncaring state, but she would brook no bullying, and she was equal in the eyes of the law to any poorhouse official or Middlesteel laundry owner.

Now, if only the Beadle could see things that way.

The head of the Sun Gate workhouse had an office increasingly at odds with the rest of the poorhouse’s shabby buildings, from his shining teak writing desk, through to the rich carpets and the obligatory oil painting of the current First Guardian, Hoggstone, hung behind it all. After Molly realized the Beadle did not seem inclined immediately to start screaming a tirade of abuse at her, the second thing she noticed was the calm presence of the elegant lady seated on his chaise longue. Smart. Quality. Too richly dressed for any inspector of schools. Molly eyed the Beadle suspiciously.

‘Now Molly,’ began the Beadle, his lazy con-man’s eyes blinking. ‘Sit down here and I will introduce you to our guest.’

Molly prepared her best barrack-room lawyer’s face. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Molly, this is Damson Emma Fairborn, one of Sun Gate’s most prominent employers.’

The lady smiled at Molly, pushing back at the curl of her blonde bob, streaked by age with a spray of platinum silver now. ‘Hello Molly. And do you have a last name?’

‘Templar,’ said the Beadle, ‘for the—’

The lady crooked a finger in what might have been displeasure and amazingly the Beadle fell silent.

‘Molly, I am sure you can speak for yourself …’

‘For the Lump Street temple, where the Aldermen found me abandoned, wrapped in a silk swaddle,’ Molly said.

‘Silk?’ smiled Damson Fairborn. ‘Your mother must have been a lady of some standing to have thrown good silk away. A dalliance with the downstairs staff, or perhaps an affair?’

Molly grimaced.

‘But of course, I am sure you have dwelt on the identity of your parents at some length. There is not much else to occupy the mind in a place like this, after all.’

A sudden shocking thought gripped Molly, but the lady shook her head. ‘No, Molly. I am not she; although I suppose I am of an age where you could be my daughter.’

The Beadle harrumphed. ‘I should warn you, Molly has something of a temper, damson. Or should I say temperament.’ ‘To match her wild red hair, perhaps?’ smiled the lady. ‘And who would not, stuck in this damp place? Denied fine clothes, good wine, the company of gallants and a polite hand of whist? I am quite sure I would not find my temperament improved one whit if our positions were reversed.’

The Beadle glared at Molly, then looked at the lady. ‘I don’t—’

‘I believe I have heard enough from you, Beadle,’ said Emma Fairborn. ‘Now then, Molly. Would you do me the favour of bringing me that book over there?’

Molly saw the leather-bound volume she was pointing to on one of the higher of the Beadle’s bookshelves. She shrugged, walked over to the shelf and slid the book out. She blew the dust off the top. Pristine. Some work of philosophy kept for impressing visitors with the weight of the Beadle’s intellect. Then she walked over to where the lady was sitting and passed the work across.

Damson Fairborn gently held Molly’s hand for a second before turning it over and examining it like a gypsy palm reader. ‘Thank you, Molly. I am so glad that your tenure in the employ of that Snell woman was brief. Your hands are far too nice to be ruined by bleach.’ She placed the book down beside her. ‘And you have a good sense of balance for someone with your height. A shade over five and a half feet I would say.’

Molly nodded.

‘My dear, you have no idea how many pretty girls I meet who clump around like shire horses at a country fair, or waddle like a duck with the bad fortune to have been dressed in a lead corset. I think I can work with you. Tell me, Molly, have you enjoyed your time here at the house?’

‘I have found it … somewhat wearisome, damson,’ Molly replied.

She seemed amused. ‘Indeed, have you? You have quite an erudite turn of phrase for someone raised between these walls.’

‘The last director here was a Circlist, Damson Fairborn,’ said the Beadle. ‘She had the children in classes well past the statutory age, flouting the Relief of the Poor Act.’

‘A mind is the hardest thing to improve and the easiest thing to waste,’ said the lady. ‘And you, Molly. You have received no salary for these labours, I presume?’

‘No, damson,’ Molly answered. ‘It all goes to the Sun Gate Board of the Poor.’

Damson Fairborn nodded in understanding. ‘Yes, I am sure I would be amazed at how expensive the ward’s Victualling Board can buy in the cheapest kitchen slops. Still—’ she looked directly at the Beadle ‘—I am sure the suppliers have their overheads.’

The Beadle positively squirmed behind his writing desk.

‘Well, my dear.’ Damson Fairborn adjusted the short silk-print wrap draped around her jacket’s shoulders. ‘You will do. I think I can pay you a handsome stipend once the poor board’s monthly fees have been accounted for.’

Molly was shocked. If there was an employer who was paying the poorhouse’s dole and adding on an extra salary for the boarders, it was a first for the Sun Gate workhouse. The whole rotten idea of the poorhouse was as a source of cheap labour for the ward.

‘She’s an orphan, mind,’ reminded the Beadle. ‘She reaches her maturity in a year and then she’s a voter. I can only transfer her ward papers to you for twelve months.’

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

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.’

‘Just the one,’ said Harry, lifting off a battered ivory-handled travel box. ‘And there we are.’

Each of the visitor’s words was carefully nuanced, as if Harry were polishing each vowel before saying it. They belied the otherwise rough appearance of the man. Oliver offered to take the case, but Harry shook his head. ‘You work for Titus?’

‘He’s my uncle. I suppose I do.’

‘Ah, well then.’ Harry stopped to look at Oliver as they left the field. ‘Young Master Brooks. Perhaps I should have recognized you. Although there’s not much about the babe that I see in the man.’

That made Oliver start. ‘You knew my parents?’

‘That I did, Oliver. My trade sometimes put me in the path of your father and mother. You were nearly sick on me once, as a swaddling. Do you remember either of them?’

‘No. Not at all.’ Oliver could not keep the pain out of his voice. ‘My uncle. He doesn’t talk about them.’

‘It’s as hard to lose a brother as a father, old stick,’ said Harry, gently. Seeing the effect the conversation was having on Oliver, he stopped. ‘Let’s not talk of it either, then. We’ll allow those who have moved along the Circle to rest in their new lives.’

Oliver wondered if his uncle’s visitor knew he was registered. Probably. If he had known his parents, he would have heard the stories of what had happened to them. And to Oliver. If it bothered Harry, he did not show it.

They were in town now. Seventy Star Hall lay beyond Hundred Locks proper, nestled at the foot of the hills that led up to the Toby Fall Rise. A dog tied to a post outside the fish market was barking as dockers down from Shipman Town arrived to find evening lodgings at the inns and drinking houses, their heavy steel-capped boots clattering against the cobblestones.

The talk of his parents had lowered Oliver’s mood. So this was to be the map of his life, then. Allowed no proper trade or apprenticeship. Signing onto the county registration book once a week. Shunned by most of the townspeople. Running small errands for his uncle to keep him busy and out from under his relative’s feet. Unable to leave the parish boundaries without being declared rogue and hunted down. Denied those simple freedoms that even the fox in the burrow or the swallow in the tree took for granted. An object of pity, perhaps; charity, on his uncle’s part; aversion from those who were once his friends and fellows.

With those bleak reflections they reached Seventy Star Hall to be met on the doorstep by the maid of all works, Damson Griggs. She took in Harry Stave – his battered travel case and cheap clothes – and wrinkled her nose in disapproval, as if Oliver were a cat returning with a dead mouse for her pantry.

Damson Griggs was a fierce old bird, and whether it was the prospect of working with the damson, or being in the same house as a registered boy such as Oliver, she was now the only full-time member of housekeeping staff at Seventy Star Hall. Any other house of similar size in Hundred Locks would have at least five or six staff keeping the place. But Titus Brooks was something of a lonely, anti-social figure, so perhaps it suited him to keep the arrangement that way. Damson Griggs regarded the town’s superstitious fear of Oliver as stuff and nonsense. She had known the boy since a pup, and if there was an ounce of feymist in him, it had not manifested itself in front of her these last eleven years.

Oliver might have been of the same opinion himself, but then he had never told his uncle or their housekeeper about his cold, dark dreams.

‘What wicked wind has blown you to our doorstep, Harold Stave?’ asked the damson.

‘Harry, please, Damson Griggs,’ said their visitor.

‘Well then, I suppose I had better be about locking up the master’s brandy cabinet if you are to be staying with us. Unless you have finished with your dirty boozing and lusting across the length and breadth of Jackals – and a good many other nations besides, I don’t wonder.’

‘Now who’s been impugning my reputation in such a manner?’ asked Harry, scratching at his blond mop of hair. ‘There’s not a drop of the old falling-down water passed my lips these two weeks, Damson Griggs.’

‘Your manners were too coarse for the navy to keep you.’ Damson Griggs wagged a sausage-sized finger at the man. ‘And they’ll keep you no better under this roof either.’

Despite her admonishments, she opened the door wider for Harry to enter, taking his thin summer travel cloak and hanging it on one of the bullhorn-shaped hooks in the hallway. Wide and white-tiled, the hallway was still filled with bright clean light. By late afternoon the sun would be behind Toby Fall Rise and the north end of Hundred Locks would live up to its name – Shadowside – as the shade from the dike fell across their house. Then the damson would bustle around, lighting the oil lamps filled with fatty blood from the massive slip-sharps netted in the Sepia Sea and slaughtered above them in Shipman Town.

‘Thank you kindly, damson,’ said Harry. He winked at Oliver.

A noise came from upstairs. Titus Brooks was still in his study, an onion-shaped dome in which the previous occupant – a retired naval officer – had installed a telescope. Now only the brass mountings remained in the centre of the room, the telescope itself having been removed when he died and sold off by his sons and daughters.

Damson Griggs disappeared with the guest, coming back down the staircase alone. ‘You pay heed to my words, Oliver Brooks. Stay away from that man. He’s a bad sort.’

‘Is he a sailor, Damson Griggs?’ Oliver asked.

‘The only airship he flies in is the Lady Trouble,’ spat the housekeeper.

‘He was a sailor, though? You said…’

‘You just mind what I have to say now, young Master Brooks. The only action that jack ever saw was the watering down of an honest sailor’s rum ration. Harry Stave used to work for the Navy Victualling Board before you were even born, buying in victuals, celgas and other supplies for the RAN. He knows your uncle from his contracts with the Board. But Mister Stave was discharged. Caught with his hand deep in the till, no doubt.’

‘And he works for Uncle Titus now?’

‘No, young master. He most certainly does not. He works for himself, just as much as he always did.’

‘So what trade does he keep that would bring him here?’

‘A good question indeed. And if you ask him direct I doubt you’ll get an honest answer. Some old toot about buying cheap and selling for a little more is as like what you would hear.’

Oliver stared up the stairs towards his uncle’s study.

‘No, young Master Brooks, you had better give that man a wide berth. Your neck is too valuable to me to see it ending up dancing for the hangman’s crowds outside the walls of Bonegate. And if you keep company with that rascal for too long, you’ll be heading down the path of criminality, of that I am certain.’

There was no tweaking Damson Griggs’s nose when she took against someone, so Oliver just nodded in agreement. From where he was standing, the path of criminality had more to recommend it than an errand boy’s apprenticeship granted out of pity and familial kinship for a dead brother.

‘Out from under my feet now with your questions, young Master Brooks,’ commanded the damson. ‘Millwards delivered our pantry stock this morning and I have a pie to bake for supper. An extra large one, if that rascal upstairs with your uncle intends to stay the night.’

Returning to Seventy Star Hall from the crystalgrid oper ators’ at twilight’s last gleaming with a leather satchel full of Middlesteel punch-card messages for his uncle – prices from the financial houses of Gate Street and stock movements from the exchange at Sun Lane – Oliver was worn out from walking.

Damson Griggs had returned to her cottage in town, leaving his pie and cold boiled potatoes covered by a plate in the kitchen. From the two empty wineglasses, red with the dregs of a bottle of claret, Oliver guessed that his uncle and their guest had eaten already. He walked to the top of the staircase and saw that a light was still showing under the door of his uncle’s study, the muffled sound of conversation inside.

Damson Griggs’s words of warning came to his mind. Why was this interloper of uncertain provenance visiting his uncle? Was Uncle Titus stooping to involve himself in some scheme of a dubious nature? Oliver was not a financier from some fancy address in the capital’s Sun Gate district, but his uncle’s business affairs seemed sound enough from his limited vantage point.

Oliver crept back down to the ground floor and lifted a key from under the stairs, then quietly unlocked the door to the drawing room. Inside, the fireplace’s flue ran upwards through to the study, opening into a grill above, the only source of warmth for the study during the cold winter nights at Hundred Locks. As Oliver had discovered, where heat carries upward, the sounds of conversation echo downward. Oliver placed his ear to the opening. Outside, the first evening stars were appearing. Before midnight, all seventy stars the grey limestone house was named after would be visible. His uncle and his guest’s voices were not raised and Oliver had to strain to catch snippets of the conversation.

‘Trouble – counting on a commo plan – compromised—’ His uncle.

‘If it is – think they – hostile service – learn—’ The dis reputable Stave.

‘This time – up to – in the black—’

Oliver leant forward as much as he dared. There was a familiar tapping. His uncle clearing his mumbleweed pipe on the side of his desk.

‘Will they be coming—’ Harry Stave.

‘Our friends in the east?’ Uncle Titus.

The East? Oliver’s eyes widened. The Holy Empire of Kikkosico lay northeast. And directly east lay Quatérshift – but no friends there. Not since the Two-Year War.

In defeat, the Commonshare of Quatérshift had completely sealed its land border, hexing up a cursewall between the two nations; to deter any of her own compatriots who developed a yearning to leave Quatérshift’s revolution-racked land, as well as putting off military incursions by the Jackelians. There was no official trade with the shifties, although smugglers still landed cargoes of brandy along the coast, where moonrakers could evade the attentions of officers from the customs house. Like all the children in Hundred Locks, Oliver had been severely warned never to stray into the hinterlands east of the town, where only the shadows of patrolling aerostats and the odd garrison of redcoats and border foot lay dotted across the wind-blighted moors.

‘A dirty game—’ Harry Stave.

‘Already – in the wind—’ Uncle Titus. There was a rasp as a chair was pulled back. ‘Two of my people dead—’

Dead! Oliver caught his breath. What foul business had Harry Stave involved his uncle in? Was their warehouse in Shipman Town concealing casks of untaxed brandy? Had officers from the customs house been murdered on some small rocky harbour in the mountains above?

A sudden realization struck Oliver. His uncle had never revealed the full extent of his business dealings to him. Oliver ran errands and gleaned what he could, learning piecemeal from the occasional tale of which factor could be trusted to deal fairly, which clipper captain might be tempted to skim a cargo. Only his uncle was at the centre – none of his staff. Even Oliver could see the interests of those in the warehouse never stretched – or were allowed to stretch – further than Shipman Town’s wharves. Was this more than a cautious nature? Or did the left hand’s ignorance of the right hand’s dealings stem from the need to keep Uncle Titus from dangling on the wrong end of a hangman’s rope outside Bonegate gaol?

There was more scraping of chairs from upstairs and Oliver silently slid the drawing room door shut, then climbed into his bed on the ground floor. Damson Griggs had the measure of Harry Stave, it seemed. But just how deep did his uncle’s involvement go? Oliver felt the sting of shame as his immediate reaction to the thought of his uncle being thrown into prison was not concern for his sole surviving relative, but worry for his own fate. His uncle had already risked exile from what passed for polite society at Hundred Locks for keeping a registered boy under his roof, but no, the unworthy Oliver Brooks was more concerned about what might happen to his own neck.

If Uncle Titus were incarcerated, he would be left with no chance of employment at Hundred Locks, no future save the cold unwelcoming gates of the local Poor Board. He shivered at the thought. The county of Lightshire’s poor and down on their luck had enough problems of their own; a registered boy being thrown into their midst might be the final straw. How much easier to arrange a small accident at night? A pillow slipped over his face and the unwelcome interloper smothered out of the poorhouse inhabitants’ lives.

His grey future, ensnared between the invisible walls of his prison-in-exile at Hundred Locks, was growing smaller and smaller as he drifted off into an uneasy sleep.

Chapter Three

Surveillant Forty-six nudged the telescope a touch to the left with the foot pedal. It took a couple of seconds for the transaction engine to balance the array of mirrors, the image in the rubber face-glove losing focus before returning to sharpness with a clack – clack – clack. From the corner of his eye, Surveillant Forty-six could see the other surveillants riding the cantilevered brass tubes, cushioned red seats attached underneath the large cannon shapes of the telescopes.

The scopes followed the arc of the monitorarium, curving around the inside wall of the sphere. A gantry and rail ran behind their telescopes, monitors in grey court-issue greatcoats treading the iron plates. You could almost see the chill in the monitorarium – no heat that might interfere with the operation of the viewings.

‘Your report please.’ It was Monitor Eighty-one. She was always brusque and efficient. The wires in his earphones looped back to the gantry, to a voice trumpet where Eighty-one was bending down to speak.

The monitor was one of the new batch, fresh out of training, one of the ones who thought that relaying reports through, was the same as reporting to. He harrumphed. She lacked even the slight worldsinger craft the surveillants practised. Kicking her feet along the gantry in her fur-lined boots to prevent frostbite, unable to heat her body with her mind. Wearing one of the surveillant’s own leather skins would see her frozen to death in a telescope sling before the end of her first watch. Unable even to modify her blood after sampling one of the many potions the surveillants took to stay awake and focused, weeks at a shift.

‘This unit is still pulling slightly to the left,’ complained Surveillant Forty-six. ‘I thought a mechomancer had taken the telescope up to the maintenance level.’

‘Stop your whining,’ hissed the monitor. ‘This is a priority observation – someone could be listening. It might be for the old lady herself. You lose the plot on this job and there’ll be bloody analysts crawling all over us. Just give me your report.’

The surveillant held his tongue. Priority it may be, but not high enough to get his scope pulled out of the monitorarium and into the maintenance schedule, it seemed. ‘Target’s aerostat arrived at the Hundred Locks field as scheduled. Target was escorted to the contact’s house, as anticipated. Target has remained there for the last seven hours. Do you have any analyst predictions or instructions?’

‘There is an eighty-seven per cent chance the target will remain in the house for the next sixteen hours. Maintain surveillance.’

The surveillant sighed. ‘Preparing for night-time sighting.’ He pulled a drinking tube from the telescope, supping at the orange gloop that dribbled out. The potion warmed his skull as sparks fireworked across his eyes; the brew’s night vision would last until sunrise. As the liquid coursed through his body, he reached inside himself with one of the worldsinger magics, rendering the potion inert before it struck his liver, where the strange brew would have ruptured that organ into a broiled stew.

He gazed back into the rubber mask and centred the view on the smokeless chimney of Seventy Star Hall. True to form, the scope slid to the left. He cursed the bureaucrats of the Court. Silently.

Chapter Four

It was hard to predict when the Whisperer would come to Oliver in his dreams. Sometimes he could go for weeks without a visitation – other times the Whisperer might come four nights in a row.

Oliver was in a large palace somewhere, his uncle, Damson Griggs and others running through the corridors, trying to find a missing chair. The chair was important, obviously. Oliver knew it was a dream because he had never met the King, and the not-so-merry monarch said if they could only find the chair, parliament might agree to sow his arms back on. Then the Whisperer pushed through into the dream.

‘Oliver, I can see you. Can you see me?’

‘I can’t see you, Whisperer, go away.’

‘Then you can, Oliver,’ hissed the misshapen form that had appeared before him. ‘I can connect with you. I can connect with almost all of our kind.’

‘I’m not like you, Whisperer,’ said Oliver.

‘No. I realize that, Oliver. You are the best of us. I have waited a lifetime or more for you to arrive. The others think they’re perfect, the ones who aren’t locked up in here with my friends and me. But they haven’t met you, Oliver. If they had they wouldn’t be so proud, so vain, so content with themselves and their powers.’

Oliver knew they kept the Whisperer locked somewhere dark, deep beneath the earth. Chained in by hexes and curse-walls and powerful worldsinger gates. His ugly lumpen face was beyond description, a wreckage of human flesh. When the Whisperer had been born, his terrified parents must have run a league in the opposite direction.

‘Can’t you get out of my mind?’ pleaded Oliver. ‘Get out of my life?’

‘You are my life, Oliver,’ hissed the creature. ‘You and the others I contact. Do you think my own life is worth the living? They keep me in the dark, Oliver, alone in a cell hardly tall enough to stand up in so I can’t rush the warders when they remember to check I’m still here. The rats visit me, Oliver. Drawn by my smell and waste. I break my teeth on their bones, sometimes, when the warders forget to feed me.’

Oliver felt sick. ‘And what do they taste like?’

The Whisperer laughed, a sound like air escaping from an expansion engine. ‘What do they taste like, Oliver? Like chicken, Oliver, like the finest roast chicken. I borrowed the taste from your mind. I hope you don’t mind. I have so few reference points.’

Oliver gagged and the Whisperer danced a mad little jig in front of him. ‘I try not to eat the food they give me, Oliver. They put potions in it, to soften my brain and keep me tired, sleepy.’

In the dream palace the King had appeared again, but he took one look at the Whisperer and turned smartly around.

‘How sad, Oliver. Even the phantoms in a dream find me repulsive. Remind me. This time, is it me dreaming of you, or is it you dreaming of me?’

‘What does it matter?’ Oliver shouted. ‘Leave my mind alone.’

‘Your time is coming, my perfect friend,’ said the Whisperer. ‘You are about to find out what a flexible and surprising thing life is. And when you do, you might be very glad of me crawling around in your skull. Yes, you might be very glad indeed.’

‘I am rather sure I won’t be,’ said Oliver.

‘Don’t make your mind up quite so fast, Oliver. Things have already started moving. Your curious visitor, Harry Stave. What do you think of him, boy? Bit of a dark horse, perhaps. Bit of a bludger and a broadsman?’

‘I don’t—’

‘Shhhh,’ hushed the Whisperer. ‘You’re going to get woken up in a couple of seconds.’

He was.

It was an early start to sign on the county registration book, and as always, Oliver found himself outside the Hundred Locks police station in time to see the prisoners from the night before marched away from the cells, across to the magistrate’s small office along Rayner’s Street. Among the usual string of tavern brawlers were a handful of Quatérshiftian refugees: two men and a single woman – possibly their sister.

Their clothes were ruined and Oliver guessed they had escaped across the sea, circumventing the cursewall along the border with Jackals. One of the men was shaking uncontrollably, his compatriots stunned into a shocked silence. What tales had they been told by the Commonshare’s propaganda committee? That Quatérshift had won the Two-Year War? That Jackals was now a model of Carlist right-practice? That Jackals had suffered a famine too, after replacing its farmers with Committees of Agrarian Equalization and marching its educated yeomen into a Gideon’s Collar – the steam-driven killing machines which now filled the Commonshare’s city squares?

Whatever the lies, they had not been enough to keep these three from escaping the great terror in Quatérshift. Since the Commonshare’s worldsingers had laid the cursewall, there had been so few refugees making it alive to Jackals that magistrates now granted the shifties automatic political asylum. One of the many émigré charities would be called in to help. After all, there were now more Quatérshiftian nobles sloshing around Jackals than there were back in the homeland – the lucky ones who had flooded out with their gold before the cursewall was raised. The less fortunate quality were still in Commonshare camps waiting on a piece of paper with a red number scrawled across it … followed by an iron bolt fired through the neck.

As the line of prisoners disappeared down the street, Oliver knocked on the station door and entered.

‘Oliver.’ Sergeant Cudban glanced back from locking the door to the cells. ‘That time of the week already?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ said Oliver.

‘Come on in laddie, don’t stand on ceremony. Your wee conjurer is already around the back. Would you like a nice cup of caffeel? Young Wattle’s just brewed up.’

Oliver nodded. Sergeant Cudban was a brusque, straightforward uplander, and he had little patience for the worldsingers and even less for the superior manners of Oliver’s personal tormentor, Edwin Pullinger, the county’s Inspector Royal from the State Department of Feymist.

‘A busy night?’ Oliver asked.

‘Aye, the usual. Although I did have the parson in here yesterday. Somebody’s been stuffing political pamphlets inside the book of Circlelaw.’

‘Pamphlets,’ laughed Oliver.

‘You should have seen the man’s face. The highlights of Community and the Commons, it was. I don’t think the parson had ever read it before and the thought of Carlists in the pews of his good Circlist church had him in a right tizzy.’

Oliver shrugged. ‘For that matter, I don’t think I’ve ever read it either.’

The sergeant winked at Oliver. ‘I’ll slip you a copy later then, compatriot. Never sat well with me, laddie, burning books. Them’s the sort of larks foreigners get up to, not us Jackelians. Benjamin Carl hasn’t been seen alive since eighty-one anyway, and to my mind, since the uprising was crushed most of his revolutionaries have been baking bread and milling steel for the last fifteen years.’

‘And printing pamphlets,’ Oliver added slyly.

Sergeant Cudban pinned up a reward on the wall, an illustration of a highwayman and a modest reward staring down on them. ‘Grumbles, laddie. Everyone’s got grumbles. You happy, laddie? Being dragged in here to sign on every week at the pleasure of that purple-robed prat? And do you think I’m happy? Three wee constables to keep the parliament’s law in Hundred Locks while Shipman Town above has ten times that number. What do they do all day – interview cod? Arrest gulls? And send their beered-up sailors down here to break each other’s heads in my taverns.’

Constable Wattle poked his face around the door. ‘Inspector Pullinger wants to know why he’s being kept waiting.’

‘See, laddie. Grumbles.’ The sergeant turned to his constable. ‘The Department of Feymist would not like the answer to that question, young Wattle.’

Oliver was ushered into the office. Cudban unobtrusively took up position underneath the station’s weapons rack, cleaning the cutlasses in the top row and oiling the walnut-stocked rifles below. Listening all the while. It was not unknown for the Department to resort to worldsinger mind tricks to get results – but it would not happen while old Cudban was in charge of policing the Hundred Locks Township.

The oily sorcerer had a new arrival sitting by his side, another Department of Feymist worldsinger, though not much older than Oliver. An acolyte. Pullinger rubbed his brow where a tattoo of four small purple flowers shone – the mark of his rank among the worldsingers.

Edwin Pullinger turned the register on the writing desk around and pushed it towards Oliver. ‘Your official signature, Mister Brooks. My colleague here will be counter-signing for the Department.’

Oliver picked up the stylus and dipped its nib in the inkpot. ‘Planning to retire, Inspector Pullinger?’

‘Not any time soon, young Master Brooks,’ Pullinger replied. He took out a small snuffbox of purpletwist and, measuring a pinch on the back of his hand, sniffed at the rare pollen. Addictive when inhaled, it also enhanced the power of a worldsinger. The acolyte produced a flat green crystal, tracing a line of truth sigils in the air over it.

Resigned, Oliver placed his right hand on the truth crystal while Pullinger commenced the ritual questioning.

‘Have you manifested any of the following powers of feymist abomination? Telekinesis, the power of flight, abnormal strength, mental control over animals, invisibility, the power to generate heat or flame…’ Pullinger ran through the exhaustive list.

‘I haven’t,’ said Oliver, when the sorcerer finished at last. ‘Have you?’

Sergeant Cudban snorted with amusement at the answer.

Pullinger leant forward. ‘If I had, young Master Brooks, it would have been as the result of the disciplined study of the worldsong and mastery of my own natural abilities over the bones of the world.’

‘Naturally.’

‘And that is precisely the point,’ said Pullinger. ‘By nature. Naturally. I could take the most talentless clodhopping constable in this station and with enough time and diligence teach him to tap leylines and move objects around using the worldsong.’ To demonstrate his point, the pen rose from Oliver’s hand and floated in the air to the worldsinger.

‘Don’t bother on my account,’ muttered Sergeant Cudban.

Pullinger leaned back in his chair, addressing his acolyte. ‘Young Master Brooks, as you can see, is my greatest challenge. An enigma. How much exposure to the feymist does it take on average for an abomination to occur?’

‘Anything from two minutes to an hour,’ answered the acolyte.

‘Correct,’ said Pullinger. ‘You can be sleeping soundly in your bed when a feymist rises from the soil, and the first you will know of it is when your body begins to change in the morning.’

The boy nodded.

‘Two minutes,’ Pullinger repeated. ‘Yet young Brooks’ aero-stat crashed into the very feymist curtain itself when he was just one year old. And he was found wandering out, alone, the sole survivor, four years later. Four years exposed to the feymist. Too young to feed himself. And when he resurfaces – no feybreed powers, no abominations, no memory of what happened to him behind the curtain.’

‘Perhaps I was raised by wolves,’ said Oliver.

‘Have you remembered anything of your time behind the feymist curtain since our last meeting?’

‘No,’ lied Oliver. As usual the truth crystal was not alerted by his reply.

‘Have you had any dreams you would class as unusual?’

‘No,’ lied Oliver, the Whisperer’s hiss in his ears.

‘Have you had any mental conversations with relatives you believe might be dead?’

‘No,’ said Oliver. ‘Although if I did, I really wouldn’t mind.’

Pullinger clearly did not believe a word of it. Four years exposed to the feymist and no resulting abominations. It was unheard of, an impossibility. Oliver had become his life’s work. His obsession.

‘I know you are hiding something, boy,’ said the worldsinger. ‘You may pass the crystal but you are not telling me everything, I can feel it in my gut.’

‘Been staying at the Three Bells, have you?’ muttered the sergeant. ‘We’ll have to do something about the state of their kitchen.’

Pullinger ignored the jibes. ‘What do you have to fear, Oliver? You are normal physically. You wouldn’t end up with the broken gibbering things at Hawklam Asylum, I can promise you that.’

‘I would serve.’

‘Yes, Oliver. You would serve. In the Special Guard your powers would be put to the service of the people. You would be a hero, Oliver. No longer something unknown, to be feared and loathed. But a champion of the state – protecting your countrymen from our enemies abroad and at home.’

‘With a torc around my neck,’ said Oliver. ‘Controlled by someone like you.’

‘For all our powers, Oliver, the order is still human. Trusted to contain those who clearly are not. The torc is our insurance in case a feybreed goes rogue … or insane. How many fey are ever executed by torc? None so far this year.’

Oliver shook his head. ‘I’m more human than your friends in the Department of Feymist.’

‘I know you think you have been treated badly, Oliver. But that’s the self-centred perspective of a young man who has seen nothing of life or the world. This is for your safety – and ours. You have not seen the things we have in the Department. You could go fey one night and wake up in the morning with as much in common with us as you have with the insects in your garden. You could decide to turn your uncle’s body inside out just to see what it looks like. You could walk through Hundred Locks setting people alight with your mind just to hear the difference in their screams. I have seen that happen, boy.’

‘I would never do that.’

‘People fear the feymist, Oliver. They fear it when whatever is behind the curtain seeps its poison across Jackals, changing its victims. They fear an abomination that hasn’t been tested and submitted to the people’s control.’

‘But I am normal,’ Oliver nearly shouted. ‘I’m the same as the rest of you.’

‘You can’t be the same, Oliver. Not after four years inside the feymist curtain. You are the only one who has been inside and lived to return.’

‘I don’t remember those years.’

‘What life is it here for you, Oliver? Your neighbours and friends terrified of your torcless neck, terrified you’ll wake up one day fey and rogue. Show me what you really are and let me conscript you into the Special Guard.’

‘Hundred Locks is my home.’

‘It’s your prison, Oliver. You would be happier among your own kind. Captain Flare would welcome you into the legion like a brother. Bonefire and the other champions of the guard would make you into a hero.’

Oliver remained silent.

‘The common herd worship the Guard, Oliver. There wouldn’t be a tavern in the kingdom you couldn’t walk into and have Jackelians falling over themselves to stand you a drink. And the women, Oliver. You haven’t seen how the women drool over the Special Guard; hang on their every word. You would have Dock Street writers penning your adventures in the legion into myth. All that, and what do you have here?’

‘My freedom,’ said Oliver, quietly.

‘A curious sort of freedom,’ said the sorcerer. ‘And it has come very cheap for you, so far. But the day may not be far off when you find the price of it rises.’

‘I am normal,’ Oliver protested, the words sounding hollow even as he said them. ‘Normal.’

Pullinger and his Department stooge made ready to leave. ‘You’ll slip one day, Oliver. Lose control and reveal yourself. When you do, we’ll be there to bind you. Or stop you.’

Sergeant Cudban shook his head as the two sorcerers left. A row of polished cutlasses and rifles lay on the table in front of him. ‘I admire your spirit, laddie. But are you doing yourself any favours?’

‘You think I should give him what he wants?’

Cudban shrugged. ‘I de nae know if there’s an ounce of fey in your bones, laddie, but that four years inside the feymist curtain is a life sentence as far as they’re concerned. They’ll keep you on the county register till your hair is silver and you’re walking with a stick. It’s no life for you.’

‘It’s not fair.’

‘I knew a Ham Yard detective, laddie; once he took it into his head that you were guilty, you might as well confess to the doomsman and take a shorter sentence, innocent or no. Either way they’d take you.’

‘Even if I’m not fey?’

‘Especially if you’re nae, laddie. Just tell them that old Isambard Kirkhill is sending you messages from beyond the grave – let them put a suicide torc around your neck and stick you in the Special Guard. He wasn’t lying about that. They live like Guardians down in Middlesteel. A bit of light duty protecting the people from the King. Let the heavy crushers like Captain Flare do any real fighting that parliament orders your way. I’ll be reading in The Middlesteel Illustrated about what a fine young champion of the state you are before midwinter.’

But Oliver was not thinking about the Special Guard. He was thinking about Hawklam Asylum; the sibilant venom-words of the Whisperer; what it would be like to be ensnared for the rest of his years in a dark airless cell next door to the inhuman dream walker.

Maybe it was a sixth sense – something within him finally fulfilling the Department of Feymist’s expectations – but Oliver knew something was wrong the moment he opened the back door to Seventy Star Hall. Everything in the lumber-room was as it should be, the jumble of rakes, earthenware pots and old garden boots, the dusty cloth-covered round table.

Despite this, the hairs stood up on Oliver’s neck, a deep sense that things were no longer as they ought to be. Cautiously he left the garden door ajar rather than clunking it shut, and peered into the kitchen. Damson Griggs lay face-down on the kitchen tiles, her blank eyes staring lifeless across the pooling blood. There was a small wood-handled knife from the kitchen drawer embedded in the back of her head. The practical, protective Damson Griggs, the old lady who did not have a single bad bone in her body; snuffed out with the casualness of a garden beetle flattened under a boot.

Oliver choked back a sob. He felt faint, like his soul was being drawn into the sky, his body lifted in the updraft of the death. Then his raw animal instinct for survival kicked in and he was back in the kitchen. Had Damson Griggs come in the back way too, surprising some cracksman stealing the house’s silver plate? Where was his uncle?

Oliver felt a wave of panic rising in his stomach. His uncle should be home; why had he not heard the damson’s cries? He slipped a large knife out of the sharpening block by the porcelain basin, briefly comforted by its heft. Someone coughed outside the kitchen. Oliver tried not to slip on the blood – impossibly brown when it surely should have been red – and he went to look through the crack of the door to the hallway.

There was a man he did not recognize – no, two of them – rifling quickly through the hall’s letters cabinet. They wore black clothes of a cut Oliver had never seen before. Where was his uncle? Oliver gripped the knife tighter, willing himself to move – when a hand clamped over his mouth and his knife arm was seized in a vice-like grip.

It was Harry Stave.

<Oliver>

The voice was in his skull, their guest’s lips still sealed grimly shut.

<Don’t make a sound, Oliver. There are others in the house. Killers. Move your mouth without speaking. I’ll lip-read.>

‘How are you doing this?’ Oliver silently mouthed. ‘Are you a worldsinger? Where’s my uncle?’

<Titus was in the house when I left this morning. Mind echo’s a worldsinger technique, but you’ll not find any purple tattoos on me, old stick.>

‘Who are they?’ Oliver mouthed. ‘What are they doing here?’

<The who is something I would dearly like to know myself. And the what is too complicated a tale for right now.>

‘Are they armed?’ Oliver mouthed.

<Miracle if they’re bleeding not. I need you to run back to the crushers, Oliver, bring back as many constables as you can.>

‘But you…’

<There’s a chance Titus might still be alive upstairs. I’m staying. I’ll fight if I have to, run if it comes to it. Now GO!>

Oliver arrived back at the police station lathered in sweat, his heart hammering inside his chest. Please let the station be manned. Hitting the door latch, he burst in, startling Sergeant Cudban.

‘Sergeant,’ Oliver panted. ‘Damson Griggs is dead, killers still in the house.’

Then Oliver noticed the two smartly dressed men on the other side of the room. ‘Well, sergeant. It’s as I was just telling you. It appears my words were prophetic.’

Cudban nodded at the two men. ‘Brigadier Morgan and Captain Bates from Ham Yard, Oliver.’

‘And it’s no great feat of detection on my part to name the leader of the killers,’ said the man Cudban had identified as a brigadier.

‘Harry Stave,’ said the one called Bates.

Oliver’s eyes went wide. ‘But he’s still—’

‘Harry Stave slipped the scaffold outside Bonegate fifteen years back,’ said the brigadier. ‘And he’s been leaving a trail of corpses across Jackals ever since.’

‘You’ve had a lucky escape, laddie,’ said Cudban. ‘Him and his gang of cut-throats are still at your house?’

Oliver groaned. Uncle Titus. His uncle was at the mercy of a gang of thugs and tricksters. And he had abandoned him to his fate back at Seventy Star Hall. Oliver glanced at the warrant that Cudban was holding, an illustration of Harry Stave looking out at him below a line of blood-code sigils, information that could only be read by a transaction engine, then the warrant’s script. The red lettering leapt out at Oliver. Harry Stave. Escaped execution from Bonegate prison, 1560. A long list of aliases underneath. Two oversized initials at the foot of the page: C.I. – crown immunity if handed in dead.

Cudban pulled a rifle down from the wall rack, broke the gun and carefully slipped a glass charge into its breach. ‘He got Damson Griggs then, laddie? Murdering wee jigger. Well, he won’t be getting close to the noose this time, not even if he gives himself up.’

‘But he let me go,’ said Oliver. ‘He could have killed me too.’

‘Ego,’ said the captain from Ham Yard. ‘Not much good leaving a trail of villainy in your wake if the penny dreadfuls blame it on a rival crew.’

The brigadier lifted a cutlass off the table. ‘Your other constables?’

‘One’s at the airship field, the other man’s out towards the dike and the Hundred Locks navigation,’ spat Cudban. ‘By the time I round them up, Stave and his crew could be halfway to Hamblefolk.’

‘Not good,’ said the brigadier.

‘I told the county we’re running short-handed here,’ said Cudban. ‘Maybe they’ll listen now we’ve finally had a killing.’

‘No,’ said the brigadier. ‘I meant not good for you.’

He thrust the cutlass up and into Cudban’s stomach, twisting it as the sergeant stumbled back, a line of blood spilling from his mouth as he gurgled his last breath. At the same time, Bates’s arm snaked around Oliver’s neck and a fist punched him in the spine, collapsing the boy to his knees.

‘It’s a terrible thing,’ said Morgan, watching Cudban’s death throes with a solemn gravitas. ‘when a young man goes fey, killing everyone in his home.’

His colleague was pressing down on Oliver like a mountain. ‘Then murdering his registration officer.’

Oliver thrashed on the floor but couldn’t find the purchase to struggle free. The brigadier slipped a thread-thin noose from under his coat. ‘Then the boy hangs himself from a beam in the station-house for the shame of it.’

The noose looped over, cutting into Oliver’s neck.

‘How long, would you wager, captain?’ asked Morgan.

‘With his weight?’ said Bates. ‘Three minutes.’

‘Not long enough,’ said Morgan. ‘I’d have the boy down as a six-minute thrasher, choking and kicking all the way.’

‘Nah. Too skinny.’

‘A guinea on it, then, captain?’

‘Done, you old rascal.’

Oliver was hauled to his feet and a chair scraped close, the noose thread tossed over a beam.

‘Come on, son,’ grinned the brigadier. ‘You do your best and last four minutes for me.’

As if in a dream, Oliver’s chair was kicked out from underneath him, the cord of his noose biting tight – as if someone was pouring molten metal down his throat. Feet kicking and flogging the air, he tried to scream with pain but could find no voice to do it. Then the floor was slowly rising up to slap into him – were the gates of the underworld opening up underneath his shoes?

<Roll under the table.>

A rifle crack and the brigadier was tossed across the room in a haze of blood, the pistol he was reaching for suspended in the air. The other Ham Yard detective was fumbling for something underneath his coat, but Harry Stave was not waiting to reload Cudban’s rifle. Wheels of darkness spun across Oliver’s confused eyes. Harry Stave was moving like a whiplash across the room – surely nobody could move that fast? The cord must have starved his brain of air.

Bates doubled up as Harry pushed the long rifle’s butt into his stomach, then one step forward and the captain was twisting in the air, a snap as his neck cracked, limp body flopping back down onto the ground.

Coughing, Oliver pulled at the cord still circled tight around his neck. He looked up and saw the knife quivering in the wall, where it had struck after cutting his noose.

‘Uncle Titus?’ Oliver hacked.

Harry Stave shook his head sadly.

‘Oh Circle.’ The enormity of what had happened began to sink in. Three fresh corpses at his feet. Cudban dead. Damson Griggs. His uncle. ‘They tried to kill me.’

‘You were just an excuse, old stick. A convenient registered boy to blame the killings on. It was Titus and me they wanted.’

‘But they were police?’

Harry Stave kicked Bates’s body. ‘Maybe. But if they were, they weren’t the kind of crushers you’ll find cluttering up Ham Yard.’

Stave raised a finger to his lips as Oliver tried to speak. ‘I killed two back at Seventy Star Hall, Oliver. Two here. Questions later. We have to leave now.’

Everything was upside down. The police were killing people. A murderer was protecting him. Everyone he had half a care for in Hundred Locks was gone. As if he were sleepwalking, Oliver left the police station, closing the door on a huddle of sprawled corpses.

Closing the door on his entire life.

Chapter Five

Molly’s lessons with Damson Darnay in the poorhouse had never been as intensive as the month of training Lady Emma Fairborn and her tutors supervised. Lessons in etiquette conducted in empty rooms the size of warehouses, only the silent black-clad presence of the house whippers blocking the door for company. Protocol, balance, poise, how to walk, talk, think. The difference between a thrust and a parry – more than you might think. The difference between the various factions in the House of Guardians: Heartlanders, Purists, Levellers, Roarers, and Circleans – less than you might think.

Not yet allowed to roam the large mansion and its high-walled grounds – including a small boating lake – Molly was confined to a room shared with one of the other girls. An old hand bawdy girl called Justine. An air of expectation and menace hung in the air. Of what would happen to her if she failed to please a tutor, stumbled in front of one of the cold-eyed instructors of dance, philosophy or comportment.

‘We’re not a ha’penny tumble around the back of Hulk Square,’ explained Lady Fairborn with a tone of contempt in her voice when Molly had balked at the need to master yet more current affairs. ‘Of the clients who step through the doors of Fairborn and Jarndyce, those that do not directly decide the fate of Jackals will own title to significant parts of its lands and commerce.’

Molly exhaled in frustration.

‘Come, my dear,’ said Lady Fairborn. ‘Don’t play coy with me. I know what it’s like to be brought up in the poorhouse. You think that if you give your body to a boy or a girl, that is all there is to pleasuring them. But that is barely a tenth of being a good lover.’ She tapped her head. ‘The rest is what occurs within this organ.’

Molly started. ‘You were born in a—’

‘I can’t speak for where I was born, Molly. And that is largely irrelevant to where one intends to end up. But yes, like you I was raised in the orphanage wing of a Middlesteel workhouse. Not behind your well-kept walls at Sun Gate, mind, but down in the Jangles, among the city’s rookeries, sewage and human cast-offs.’

‘But you have a title…’ said Molly.

Fairborn laughed. ‘Oh Molly, the most successful whores you’ll find in Middlesteel are down on the floor of the House of Guardians. Which makes my title one of the cheapest purchased in Jackals.’

Molly seemed lost in thought.

‘Your education here, Molly, is not just about facts and where on the table to locate the soupspoon. It’s about seeing the world as it really is. Lifting the veils of hypocrisy and the lies we tell ourselves to get through the day. You still believe that working here will prove distasteful? An honest answer if you please…’

Molly nodded.

‘That’s because you have been sold a tissue of lies designed to chain you, Molly. Keep you unquestioning in your place, a compliant female and an obedient worker. Your beauty, your raw attraction for men, is a weapon. Use it well and you can achieve as much as I have. Some would have you believe that I am a victim, Molly. But when clients walk through my door, they are nothing but sheep to be shorn of their skin and their wealth. The bargains we strike here are as much an economic transaction as any that occur at a society ball or in front of a Circlist altar.

‘The genial pensmen of Dock Street might steal their small amusements by writing my activities into the pages of the penny sheets as the Queen of the Whores, but the only difference between myself and a merchant’s daughter being hawked at a coming-out ball is that I get to name my own price.’ The lady leant over and kissed Molly, her tongue brushing lightly against the girl’s. ‘And unlike those respectable married ladies of Middlesteel, I find greater opportunity for repeat sales.’

‘But what about love?’ Molly questioned.

‘The greatest lie of them all,’ Fairborn retorted. ‘A biological itch telling you it’s time you started churning out tiny copies of yourself. Weakening your body and ravaging your beauty. Trust me on this; if there was ever a handsome prince waiting for either of us on a horse, he took a wrong turn somewhere. Love is like winter flu, Molly. It soon fades after the season. Better you learn to master it, package it, label it with a price and start building a future for yourself with it.’

The time had come for Molly to be introduced to her first client. A training patron, as it was euphemistically known, to orientate her in the trade of bawdy girl to the capital’s quality. Justine sat behind Molly on the red velvet bed, combing her hair.

‘You’ve nothing to worry about, Molly. I’ve seen your jack and he’s a regular gentleman, dapper as a dandy and old too – his beard is as silver as this here comb.’

Molly’s voice dripped with sarcasm. ‘Sell him to me some more.’

‘Not one of our usuals, but he must have come highly recommended to be here. Besides, an old one is best for the hey-jiggerty. He’ll only last a couple of minutes.’

Molly shook her head. ‘I can’t do this.’

‘You’ve got no choice, Molly. You bail out and you’ll be transferred to housekeeping duties, right up until you go hard down some stairs or get crushed by a falling cabinet. The only way you’ll get out of here is by paying off your contract.’ The girl handed Molly a square of green-coloured gum. ‘Chew this, it’ll take the edge off.’

Molly gnawed suspiciously at the square. It was almost tasteless, the consistency of wet clay. ‘What is it?’

‘Leaaf,’ said Justine.

Molly nearly choked. ‘That must have cost a guardian’s ransom!’

‘Seventy sovereigns an ounce and the scaffold if you’re caught with it. One of the perks for the girls here. How old do you think I am?’

‘A couple of years older than me. Eighteen maybe?’

‘Thirty-six,’ said Justine proudly. ‘They say there’s caliphs in Cassarabia five hundred years old or more – and they’ll give you the death sentence too, if they catch you smuggling leaaf across the desert and over the border. Not all our patrons are on the right side of the law, Molly.’

Molly rubbed the clay-like substance between her fingers. Lifelast was its street name. How the life-extending substance was made or grown nobody knew, and the mages of Cassarabia had never indicated whether it came from a rare plant or was something grown in the slave wombs alongside their twisted biologicks.

‘I could have bought out my contract sixteen years ago,’ said Justine. ‘But once you’ve had money, it’s hard to go back to having nothing. Lot harder than having stayed poor and never known the difference. And you can’t buy a brick of leaaf across the counter at Gattie and Pierce.’

A small brass bell jingled and a moment later a large house whipper opened the door.

‘This way, sir,’ said Justine, beckoning the client in. She went to take his cane, but the man waved her away. He looked to Molly’s mind like an old artist, his forked silver beard arriving at two sharp points just above a fussily folded cravat.

‘I’ll take a moment to catch my breath, if I may,’ said the man. ‘This place has more stairs than the Museum of Natural Philosophy.’

There was a slight accent to his voice. Not one Molly could place.

‘As you asked, this is the new girl, sir,’ said Justine. ‘Although I believe you haven’t been acquainted with any of our other ladies before?’

‘Usually my free hours run to tending the orchids in my hothouse or listening to a well performed piece of chamber music,’ said the man. ‘But I believe this is just the girl for me.’

Justine made to go. ‘Just ring the bell pull when you’re finished, sir. I or one of the other ladies will escort you out down a private passage. No risk of accidentally bumping into another of our gentlemen that way.’

‘Yes, I can see how that would be embarrassing,’ said the old man. ‘Although I would prefer it if you would stay a while with Molly and myself.’

‘If you would like an extra lady, sir, I can arrange that—’ she stopped puzzled. ‘But I told you this girl was called Magdalene…’

‘You misunderstand me, my dear. I do not require an extra girl,’ said the old man. A steel blade snicked out of his cane as he slashed it across Justine’s throat. ‘I require one less witness to have seen my face.’

Choking on her own blood, Justine stumbled and fell dying towards the green felt bell pull, the one they were to use if a patron ever turned violent. The door exploded open and the house whipper was in the room, a police-issue lead cosh in his ham-sized fist. Molly did not wait to see the bruiser closing on the old man; she was rolling off the velvet sheets, eyes darting around for an exit. The sash window had bars across it; the door was open but blocked by the two men; then her eyes fell on the cold fireplace. She had done smaller vents. Before the Blimber Watts tower breach. The memory of the last time she had crawled through a small space hit her. How could she go back to that?

There was a hacking noise from the whipper. One of his arms had been severed below the elbow, blood fountaining from the stump. The old man’s cane had split into two blades and they traced a strange almost hypnotic dance in front of the shocked bawdyhouse enforcer.

Maybe it was the rush of leaaf into her system, maybe it was the realization that she was surely going to die in the next few seconds, but Molly was into the fireplace and up the chimneystack as fast as a fox to its warren. The cold weight of the darkness seemed to slip past her, the air sucking her up, her feet defying gravity as they shimmied weightless from brick to brick, her fingers almost too fat now for the child-sized sweep’s holes. Was that a disappointed tutting below her at the fireplace opening? How long before the old man retraced his steps outside and found her again?

Air, cold, evening. She was on top of the roof, two storeys up. She recognized the skyline – western Sun Gate; one of the big mansions with its own wooded gardens. She slid down the iron drainpipe, each breath a wheeze and with the superhuman speed she had found the grounds flowed past her body. She vaulted fences, raced around a miniature lake; bang bang her hands slapped the wall. She glanced back – the wall was twice as tall as she was. She couldn’t have jumped that. It had to be the leaaf.

Who in the Circle’s name had that old man been? No, that was the wrong question. He was a topper – as clear as day, he was one of the kingdom’s professional killers for hire. An assassin. The right question was, why had he come into her room? Was Molly the target? Surely not. Damson Snell and her tub-load of ruined laundry were not about to lay good guineas to see young Molly Templar sliced in half. Had he killed someone in one of the other rooms and wanted to make a clean sweep? But neither she nor Justine had heard or seen a thing that night. And he had known Molly’s name when he should not have – and said something about witnesses. Perhaps Justine had been a witness to something she could not be allowed to live to repeat and Molly was the bystander. Surely the killing had not been intended for her?

Molly could not testify to any crime except the Beadle’s hand out for bribes, and he had taken care of her in his own rotten style by selling her ward papers to Fairborn and Jarndyce. Yet the killer had known her name. Asked for her specifically. That was an expensive way to end a cheap life.

She was back at the Sun Gate workhouse. Her feet had led her subconsciously to her sad excuse for a home. The hall lantern was off. Everyone would be asleep. She entered the poorhouse with trepidation. Would the Beadle believe her story? With a trail of corpses left behind in Lady Fairborn’s establishment the head of the poorhouse would have no choice. Perhaps Lady Fairborn would cut her losses and throw her out as a Jonah. She had not brought any more luck to the bawdyhouse than she had to the Blimber Watts tower.

The large double doors to the entrance hall had been left ajar slightly and there was no sign of anyone sitting on the night chair. If the Beadle caught whichever boy or girl it was that had sloped off night duty, they would be for it and no mistake. She turned left and down the rickety wooden stairs to the girls’ dormitory in the basement.

Strange. It was not past ten yet, only an hour after house curfew; there should have been some cheap tallow candles burning, the orphans reading penny dreadfuls, talking, eating fruit lifted from Magnet Market’s throwaway bins. The room was pitch black, no skylights to the street above. Molly reached for one of the matches and lit a candle.

Cheap plywood bed frames lay overturned, hemp blankets scattered across the floor. Not just blankets. Molly stood over one of the bundles on the floor, hardly daring to flip the huddle over. She did. Rachael’s cold dead eyes stared back at her.

‘Rachael.’ Molly prodded her. ‘Rachael, wake up!’

She would not be waking.

Who had done this? The world had gone mad. Toppers breaking into bawdy shops. The same senseless slaughter at the Sun Gate poorhouse.

‘Molly.’ A voice sounded from the linen chest. Something moved under the blankets. It was Ver’fey, the craynarbian girl. She was wounded, one of the orange shell-plates of her crab-like armour shattered above the shoulder.

‘Ver’fey! Your shoulder…’ Molly ran to her. ‘For the love of the Circle, what happened here?’

‘Men,’ coughed the craynarbian. ‘They came dressed as crushers from the ninth precinct, but they were no con stables, I knew at once.’

She should know. Half of Middlesteel’s police force was craynarbian; their tough exo-skeletons made them natural soldiers and keepers of parliament’s peace.

‘They did this?’

‘They were looking for you, Molly.’

‘Me?’

Ver’fey sat down on the chest, exhausted. ‘Rachael told them that the Beadle had sent you off somewhere, but he wouldn’t tell any of the rest of us where you were. Just said you’d finally got the job you deserved. One of the men thought Rachael was lying and started laying into her with his Sleeping Henry. They just beat her to death in front of us. We tried to stop them; that was when they gave me this.’ She pointed to her broken shoulder plate.

‘Where are all the others?’ Molly looked around the dormitory.

‘Took them,’ sobbed the craynarbian. ‘Took them all. The boys too.’

‘Why?’ said Molly. ‘What would they want with us?’

‘Better you ask what they wanted with you, Molly. It was you they were after. What have you done, Molly?’

‘Nothing that the rest of you weren’t up to,’ spat Molly. ‘None of this makes any sense.’

‘Perhaps it’s your family?’

‘What family?’ said Molly. ‘You are my bleeding family.’

‘Your blood family,’ said Ver’fey. ‘Perhaps they’re rich. Rich and powerful enough to hire a gang of toppers. Some father who’s just found out he has an unwanted bastard and is out to simplify the act of inheritance.’

Molly grimaced. Simplifying the act of inheritance was Jackelian slang for leaving an unwanted child on the poorhouse doorstep. Ver’fey’s theory had the ring of truth to it. She had never once felt wanted in her life, but this was preposterous. Perhaps her mother had abandoned her at Sun Gate out of love after all, out of fear of what might happen to her if her father found out he had sired a bastard

‘Come on old shell.’ Molly helped Ver’fey out of her hiding place. ‘They’ve cleared off. Best we do likewise, before someone comes back.’

‘You could come with me to Shell Town,’ said Ver’fey. ‘Hide out.’

‘Unless you can fix me up with armour and an extra pair of arms, I’m going to stick out like a sore thumb in Shell Town. You’d be in danger every minute I was with you.’

‘But where can you go?’ asked Ver’fey.

‘The Beadle always said I’d end up running with the flash mob. Reckon I’ll prove him right and disappear into the under-city – try to reach Grimhope and the outlaws.’

‘That’s too dangerous, Molly,’ said Ver’fey. ‘Do you even know how to get into the undercity?’

‘I do,’ said Molly. ‘Don’t you remember when Rachael was working for the atmospheric authority?’

‘Yes! Guardian Rathbone station.’

Guardian Rathbone station was the main terminus on the atmospheric network for Sun Gate’s workers. Thousands of clerks and clackers rode the tube capsules in through the tunnels every day, large steam engines labouring to create the airless vacuum the trains traversed.

‘There are entrances to the undercity in the atmospheric. Rachael was always going on about them. It’ll be safer than going in through the sewers.’

Ver’fey agreed. There were plenty of things in Middlesteel’s sewers, but none you would want to run into on your own. The city’s sewer scrapers only went inside armed in teams of five or six. ‘Please, Molly, you come with me to Shell Town. It’s no life for you in the undercity. There’s nothing down there but junkers, rebels and the flash mob. If some criminal doesn’t do for you, the political police will – they’re always pumping dirt-gas down into the tunnels to cull outlaws.’

Molly shook her head and knelt down beside Rachael’s body. ‘She was always the sensible one, our Rachael. Settle down to a nice safe job. Keep your nose clean. Don’t answer back.’

Ver’fey tried to pull Molly away. ‘You’re right, we should go now.’

‘Look where it got her, Ver-Ver. Bloody dead in this rotting dung heap of a home.’

‘Please, Molly.’

Molly picked up a candle and threw it into a pile of penny dreadfuls, the cheap paper catching light immediately. Flames jumped across the hemp blankets, crackling like a roasting pig.

‘A warrior’s pyre, for you, Rachael, and when I find the filthy glocker scum that did this to you – to us – I’ll burn them too and everything they hold dear. I swear it.’

Ver’fey trembled nervously on her feet. ‘Molly! Oh Molly, what have you done?’

‘Let it burn,’ said Molly, suddenly weary. She led Ver’fey back out of the dormitory before the flames took the rickety wooden stairs. ‘Let it all burn to the bloody ground.’

First Guardian Hoggstone tapped his shoe impatiently against the large porcelain vase standing by his writing desk, scenes of triumph from the civil war rendered delicately in obsidian blue. The weekly meeting with King Julius was a tiresome formality, little more than a cover for the chance to be updated by the commander of the Special Guard. Still, parliament held to its ancient forms. Two worldsingers stood silently flanking the door to the First Guardian’s office. Hoggstone smiled to himself. The Special Guard watched the King. The worldsingers watched the Special Guard. He watched the worldsingers. And who watched the First Guardian? Why, the electorate of course. That anonymous amorphous herd; that howling mob in waiting. Captain Flare came into the room. Without the King, but with the pup, Crown Prince Alpheus, in tow instead.

‘Julius?’ asked Hoggstone in a sharp voice.

‘Waterman’s sickness again,’ answered the captain. ‘He won’t be leaving the palace for at least a week.’

Hoggstone sighed and looked at the pup. It always made him nervous, seeing an almost crowned monarch with his arms still attached to his body.

‘Why, sir, is the boy not wearing his face mask?’

‘Asthma,’ said Captain Flare. ‘In the heat he chokes sometimes.’

‘I hate the mask,’ complained the prince. ‘The iron rubs my ears until they bleed.’

Hoggstone sighed again. ‘We’ll find you some royal whore, pup, for you to breed us the next king on. Then I’ll try and convince the house not to teach it to talk. Waste of bloody time having you able to say anything except parrot the vows of affirmation once a week.’

‘I hate you!’

Hoggstone rose up and drove a ham-sized fist into the prince’s stomach. The boy doubled up on the floor and the First Guardian kicked him in the head. ‘As it should be, Your Highness. Now shut up, or we’ll take your arms off early, cover them in gold plate and show them next to your father’s down in the People’s Hall.’

Flare lifted the gagging, gasping boy up and put him down on a chair. ‘Was that necessary, First Guardian?’

‘It was to me,’ said Hoggstone. The shepherd, that’s what they called Captain Flare behind his back. That’s what he had been, a herd boy, when a feymist had risen on the moors, turning Flare into a feybreed, giving him the kind of physical strength that demigods from classical history only dreamt about. But the man was soft, a useful fool protecting his new flock. The people. Yes. Everything for the people.

‘We’re not as modern as the Commonshare, sir,’ said Hoggstone. ‘Running all our nobles through a Gideon’s Collar. We still have to rely on a bit of shoe leather and a stout Jackelian foot every now and then.’

‘It’s putting the Jackelian boot in that you want to talk about?’ asked Flare. ‘The Carlists?’

‘I don’t even know if we can call the people we’re facing Carlists any more,’ said Hoggstone. ‘The local mob seems to have moved beyond the normal communityist platitudes our compatriots in Quatérshift have been mouthing of late.’

‘You suspect something?’

‘There’s trouble being stirred in the streets. Too much and too widely spread for it to be anything other than organized.’

‘That’s what the House of Guardians’ Executive Investigations Arm is for,’ said Flare.

‘The g-men have been cracking the usual skulls, netting the usual suspects. Whatever’s happening out there on the streets, the old-time Carlists are as afraid of it as we are. Their leaders have been disappearing, at least, all the ones who have been opposing the new generation of rabble-rousers. The river police have been pulling the corpses of Carlist committeemen out of the Gambleflowers for a year now.’

‘You have a target in mind for the Special Guard?’

Hoggstone sounded frustrated. ‘This isn’t a Cassarabian bandit sheikh or a royalist pirate flotilla you can smash for the state – this needs subtlety.’

‘I can rip plate metal apart with my bare hands,’ Flare pointed out. ‘Rifle charges bounce off me and my skin can blunt a fencing foil. I am not sure the Special Guard can do subtlety.’

‘But there are others who can,’ said Hoggstone.

Flare’s eyes narrowed. ‘You are talking of the fey in Hawklam Asylum.’

One of the worldsingers flanking the door moved forward. ‘First Guardian!’

‘Stand back.’ Hoggstone’s voice was raised. ‘Damn your eyes, I do know how the order feel about the things we have contained in Hawklam.’

‘They are there for a reason,’ said the worldsinger. ‘The abominations they have endured have twisted the creatures’ minds far more than their bodies. Those things have as much left in common with beings such as ourselves as we do with an infestation of loft-rot beetles, and, given the chance, they would treat us much the same.’

‘It is their minds which interest me. We do not need many – just a couple with the talent to root out the core of the enemy in our midst.’

‘Soul-sniffers,’ gasped the worldsinger. ‘You believe the order would release soul-sniffers into the world.’

‘The people would not like it,’ advised Flare.

‘I am the people, sir!’ Hoggstone roared. ‘The voice of the

people, for the people. And I will not let the people fall under the spell of a horde of communityist rabble-rousers. I will not have the talent and prosperity of this nation run through a Gideon’s Collar like so much mince through a sausage grinder. I will not!’ Hoggstone slammed his writing desk and thrust a finger towards Captain Flare. ‘You think that if the people see the misshapen human wreckage in Hawklam Asylum the mob might stop worshipping the ground the Guard walk on. Start associating your guardsmen with feybreed abominations rather than the latest damn issue of The Middlesteel Illustrated with a stonecutting of your face grinning on the cover.’

‘It is possible,’ Flare acknowledged.

‘The art of leadership is knowing when the mob’s applause has become a self-destructive echo,’ said Hoggstone. ‘If the choice is the veil being pulled off your perfect persona or the state collapsing into anarchy and mayhem, I’ll choose the former over the latter. But do not worry, we shall keep the feybreed on a short leash and run them only at night. After all, it does not do to scare the voters.’

‘We will need to fashion special torc suits for them,’ said the worldsinger. ‘And organize teams to make sure the abomi nations don’t slip them.’

Hoggstone gestured wearily. ‘Do it, then. We need to know who is behind the unrest and when they intend to act, when they intend to take advantage of their mischief.’

‘As you will.’

‘As the people will, sir. And for the Circle’s sake, put the gag back on the royal pup before you leave the House. I don’t want The Middlesteel Illustrated running a story on him being seen naked within parliament’s walls.’

Chapter Six

Ver’fey tapped Molly with one of her manipulator limbs, the short one under her big bone-sword arm. ‘Molly, we’re being followed.’ The craynarbian had never seen a creeper or vine in Liongeli, but she still had her jungle senses.

‘From where?’

‘As we turned off Watercourse Avenue.’

Molly swore to herself. They had set watchers outside the poorhouse then. Damn her family. It was one thing to know from your earliest years you had never been wanted, cast out like the previous night’s garbage. It was quite another to have your own blood trying to tidy up loose ends by slitting your throat. ‘How many?’

‘Two men.’

Molly pondered their options. ‘If it is me they want and they’ve clocked me, their numbers won’t stay at two for long. The gang that did for Rachael and the house will be swarming over Sun Gate.’

Ver’fey gestured off the street with her bone-sword. ‘We could play alley-dodge, then slice them good.’

Molly shook her head. ‘You’re a game bird, Ver-Ver, but the two of us are no match for a crew of professional toppers. End of the street, you jump left for Shell Town, I’ll cut right and lose them in the Angel’s Crust.’

Ver’fey made a noise of disgust. Like all her kind, she would only be seen dead in a jinn house – quite literally. The only effects the pink-coloured drink had on craynarbians were to make them vomit and to slow their hearts to a dangerously low palpitation.

‘Luck to us,’ said Ver’fey.

‘You blooming well look after yourself, Ver-Ver,’ said Molly.

They got to the end of the street and Molly lunged right and up Shambles Lane, the sound of Ver’fey’s heavy, shell-covered body clattering the opposite way fading as she found the narrow corridors of the Pinchfield rookeries. The Angel’s Crust was up the Shambles and on the left, a three-storey temple to Middlesteel’s sinners; the low-rent equivalent of Fairborn and Jarndyce. Two floors of drunken loutish revelry with bedrooms on the third floor, where women with low necklines and even lower morals plied Middlesteel’s oldest trade.

As she sprinted for the bright yellow light of the place, Molly caught a glimpse of two shadows racing after her. Even as she cursed, part of her was glad they had left Ver’fey to escape; the craynarbian girl could move fast over a short distance, but her armour made her a poor bet for a marathon chase. This was confirmation. Someone wanted Molly dead. Very badly indeed.

Molly hurdled a clump of collapsed snoring drinkers and hurtled through the doorless entrance. She blundered into a drinker, spraying jinn over the sawdust on the floor.

‘Crushers,’ Molly yelled like a banshee. ‘Get out – it’s a raid. Ham Street bawdy.’

The ground floor erupted in confusion as chairs wrenched back and the surge for the exits started. If there was an honest man or woman drinking or conducting business in the Angel’s Crust, they were here by mistake. Like many of the girls at the Sun Gate workhouse, Molly had earned pennies in the evening moonlighting as a watch girl at the Angel.

A pistol charge rang out by the door and something pinged off one of the roof beams, followed by a swell of uproar and even more confusion. Her two pursuers were in the taproom and Molly dived low, riding and hiding in the panicked flow of the crowd. One of the barkeeps shoved past her clutching an old black blunderbuss. She went under the bar and darted through to the cellar, racing around walls of piled oak jinn barrels, each burned with the red marque of its Cassarabian exporter.

Thank the Circle. The old staff chute was still there, behind a tattered cloth curtain. Their backdoor if a rival flash mob decided to move in on the Angel. Molly was careful to leave the cloth in place as she shoved off down the short slide, landing in a puddle of grimy water and rotting bottle corks at the foot of the tumbledown rookeries beyond.

The maze of corridors changed all the time as the inhabitants added new doorways or closed off collapsed tenements. Little chance of them catching her now. She navigated the claustrophobic streets towards the back end of the Guardian Rathbone atmospheric. Molly smelt it before she saw it; two columns of large stacks pouring dark coal smoke into the sky, keeping the atmospheric’s tunnels in vacuum.

Guardian Rathbone station was a castle of white marble stained black with soot, arched domes of glass and girders crisscrossing the passenger concourse. It was thought to be one of the most magnificent stations on the atmospheric – rivalling Guardian Fairfax station out by the palace, perhaps even Guardian Kelvin station across from the House of Guardians. It would be dangerous now, though; too late for Molly to work the mob of Sun Gate clerks going home as camouflage; just a few revellers belatedly leaving the respectable cafes and salons along Goldhair Park.

Three steammen were cleaning the concourse, collecting rubbish and polishing the mosaic of the Battle of Clawfoot Moor, the scene of parliament’s final victory in the civil war. Molly had to get out of here fast. The atmospheric was too obvious an escape route. She checked her money. A penny short of the cheapest journey on the atmospheric. Damn. If she had realized earlier she could have dipped someone’s wallet back at the Angel’s Crust.

At the end of the station two figures in dark jackets walked onto the concourse. Molly danced into the shadow cast by one of the steammen, an iron skip on short stubby legs. No chance now to vault the ticket rail and make a dash for the underground platforms – the two bruisers would clock her. Of course, they might be innocent, watchmen for one of the Sun Gate towers. Sneaking a peek over the iron box, Molly saw they had split up and were drifting through the sparse queue of passengers, sweeping the hall in a precise pattern. Not so innocent, then.

She went over the side of the iron skip, sliding into sacks of litter. The head of the steamman swivelled around to regard her. ‘Ho, little softbody. What are you doing in my collection of gewgaws?’

‘Quietly with your speaking tube,’ Molly pleaded. ‘Two men are searching for me. They mean me harm.’

An iron eye-cover blinked over the steamman’s vision glass in surprise. ‘Harm, you say? That will not do.’

‘They’ll do for me, unless you quiet down.’

The volume of the steamman’s voicebox dropped to a whisper. ‘I believe you are known to me, little softbody.’

‘Not in this life,’ said Molly. ‘There weren’t any steammen in the Sun Gate poorhouse.’

The steamman had started moving its eight stubby legs, a wheel at its front directing them, jiggling her across the public space. ‘The people of the metal do not abandon our brothers to the workhouse, that is not the way of our kind.’

‘I need to get to the undercity. Can you take me down into the atmospheric?’

‘There is a high level of physical danger in the undercity,’ said the steamman. ‘The rules of community are not adhered to below.’

‘I know it’s an outlaw society,’ hissed Molly. ‘But I haven’t got anywhere else to run to.’

‘Crawl under my sacks,’ commanded the steamman. ‘Your pursuers draw close.’

Molly buried herself under the bags of waste, leaving as small a space to breathe as she dared. She heard a gruff voice asking a passenger if he had seen a missing runaway girl. The thug omitted to mention what Molly was running away from. Then the voice was left behind and the tap, tap, tap of the steamman’s legs on the concourse became the only sound she could hear.

Molly angled her face for a better view out of the skip; the metal bars of a door were being hauled into the ceiling and they were passing into a sooty lift of a size to accommodate the large steamman.

‘Steelbhalah-Waldo has been watching over you. The ones who wish you harm have been left behind.’

Steelbhalah-Waldo indeed, Molly thought. Her rescuer spoke of the religion of Gear-gi-ju. The steammen worshipped their ancestors and a pantheon of machine-spirits, sacrificing high-grade boiler coke and burning oil from their own valves and gears.

Molly crawled out from under the piled sacks. ‘Thank you for your help, old steamer. I think you may have just saved my life.’

‘My known name is Slowcogs,’ said the steamman. ‘You may call me by my known name.’

Molly nodded. Slowcogs’ true name would be a blessed serial number known only to himself and the ruler of the machine race, King Steam. That was not for her to know. The old lift started to vibrate as it sank.

‘Can you show me the way to the undercity, Slowcogs? The way to Grimhope.’

‘The way is known to the people of the metal, young soft-body. But it is a path filled with danger. I hesitate to expose you to such risk.’

‘Middlesteel above has become too dangerous for me, Slowcogs. A professional topper has been sent after me and now many of my friends have died because of my presence. There aren’t many places left to run to. I’ll take the risk of Middlesteel below.’

‘So young,’ tutted the old machine. ‘Why do the master-less warriors of your people seek your destruction?’

‘I don’t really know,’ said Molly. ‘I suppose it has something to do with my family. I think one of my kin is trying to remove my rights of inheritance the easy way, by removing me from Middlesteel.’

‘That those who share biological property with you should act in such a way is disgraceful. But all may not be as it seems – there are many sorts of inheritance.’

The lift room opened and they were in a large vaulted chamber facing a row of empty iron skips of the type that made up Slowcogs’ body. With a wrenching sound – like metal being torn – the front of Slowcogs disengaged from the multi-legged skip, leaving it behind like a tortoise abandoning its shell. The new, smaller Slowcogs was as tall as Molly, running on three iron wheels in tricycle formation. ‘Our way lies across the atmospheric platforms. The masterless warriors who seek your life will undoubtedly finish their search above and begin looking for you below.’

‘I’ll be quick,’ Molly promised.

They followed a small gas-lit tunnel, a locked door at the end opening onto Guardian Rathbone station’s main switching hall. In the centre of the cavernous circular hall was a series of interconnected turntables shifting windowless atmospheric capsule trains between lines. Large shunting arms terminating in buffers pushed the atmospheric capsules through leather curtains and into the platform tubes. Molly could hear the drone of the passenger crowd boarding the motorless capsules on the other side of the curtain, then the sucking sound as the capsule was shunted through the rubber airlock and into the line’s sending valve, before being pressure-sped into the vacuum of the atmospheric.

Slowcogs led Molly across the switching hall on a raised walkway, into a smaller maintenance hall where capsules lay stacked like firewood across the repair bays.

‘This is the way to the undercity?’ Molly asked.

‘First we must consult Redrust,’ said Slowcogs. ‘He is the station controller and a Gear-gi-ju master. He will know the safest path.’ They climbed a shaky staircase, coming into a hut overlooking the maintenance bay. Sitting inside watching the hall through a grimy window was a steamman with an oversized head, rubber tubes dangling from his metal skull like beaded hair. Redrust’s speaking tubes were three small flared trumpets just below his neck.

‘Controller,’ said Slowcogs, ‘I have need of your assistance for this young softbody.’

Redrust’s voice echoed out like a wire being scratched across a chalkboard. ‘When do we not need the guidance of those that have passed away on the great pattern, Slowcogs?’

‘I am in particular need today, controller,’ said Molly.

The rubber tubes on his skull jangled as Redrust turned his substantial head to stare at Molly. ‘A particular need, so? Much haste in your words. You would do better to wait a while and contemplate your part in the great pattern.’

‘Events dictate otherwise, old steamer.’

‘So? Let us throw the cogs and see what Gear-gi-ju has to reveal to us this evening, then.’

Slowcogs passed a porcelain cup to the controller, filled with small metalworkings of different sizes. Redrust released a small puddle of dark blood-like oil onto the floor from his valves. Scattering the cogs into the pool, he traced an iron digit through the pile.

‘I see a girl, climbing out of the wreckage of a collapsed tower.’

‘That would be me,’ said Molly.

‘I see shadows. Moving through the city. Deaths. A stalker.’

‘Lots of people die in Middlesteel,’ said Molly.

‘I see your desire to travel into the belly of the ground, escaping the perils that snap at your heels,’ said Redrust.

‘That is my wish, sir,’ said Molly.

‘I see—’ Redrust stopped. ‘Ah, so. Great complexity. Many wheels. You did well to bring this softbody to us, Slowcogs.’

‘She is known to us,’ said Slowcogs.

‘Indeed she is. The gears have turned so far already, and now they have turned to this.’ The controller looked at Molly. ‘What do you see in the cogs, young softbody?’

‘I am no Gear-gi-ju master, controller.’

‘Nevertheless, look into the cogs; feel the pattern with your mind. Tell me what you see there.’

She knelt to look. The smell of the dark oil made Molly dizzy. ‘History. I see history, revolving, turning back into itself.’

Redrust seemed pleased with the answer. ‘I have lived many years. Seen generations of softbodies quicken past on your own wheel, filled with hurry and the hasty ambitions of your fastblood kind – but I have never seen one able to read the cogs.’

‘Remarkable,’ agreed Slowcogs.

‘But not without precedent,’ said Redrust.

‘There’s something else you have seen,’ said Molly. ‘Something you’re not telling me …’

‘That is so,’ said Redrust. ‘Often that which you do not say means as much as that which you do, and sometimes knowing the future can change it. There are things I will not speak of.’

‘You will help me to the undercity then, to Grimhope?’ Molly asked.

‘Sadly, we will,’ the scratched reply sounded from Redrust’s voicebox. ‘Your path and that of our people are tangled together in some way. I only wish we had a hero to accompany you, a champion. But our steammen knights keep inside the borders of the Steammen Free State, and it would take too long to send for such as they.’

‘I shall go, controller,’ said Slowcogs. ‘It was I that found her.’

‘You, Slowcogs?’ A soft wheeze escaped from Redrust’s boiler heart like a laugh. ‘This is a task for young metal. Your design was drafted by King Steam before even my own and I am one of the oldest steammen to serve in the atmospheric.’

‘It is as you say, controller. Our paths are bound together by the great pattern.’

‘You are a poor excuse for a knight, Slowcogs. But let it be so. Old metal guiding a young softbody. Join with me.’

Slowcogs rolled past Molly and a thin crystal rod extended from the controller, slotting into a hole in Slowcogs’ torso. They remained joined for a minute, then Slowcogs disengaged from the crystal arm with a cracking noise.

‘Thank you for your wisdom, controller.’

‘Thank you for your courage, Slowcogs.’

The old steamman took Molly’s hand and they rolled out of the controller’s hut.

‘What did he share with you?’ asked Molly.

‘Such knowledge as we possess of the paths and passages of the undercity,’ said Slowcogs. ‘But the tunnels we must travel change frequently. The outlaws of Grimhope seal caverns off to confuse the political police and the soldiers of Fort Downdirt, and the political police often send in sappers to destroy tunnels. Then there is the stream of earthflow through the ground – the same energies of the leylines that cause floatquakes.’

The mention of the word sent a shiver down Molly’s spine. Whole regions of land shattered by the earth’s forces, ripped out of the ground and sent spiralling into the air, along with any unfortunates unlucky enough to be on the sundered ground. If those caught on rising land were lucky, the newly formed aerial islands would stabilize at a height low enough for RAN airships to rescue the inhabitants. If they were unlucky, they would rise far out of sight, into the airless night, beyond even the reach of RAN aerostats; their icy graves an occasional cloudy shadow passing over the land beneath.

Geomancy was the first duty of the order of worldsingers, tapping and relieving the lethal forces surging below the ground before they coursed into violence and destroyed large swathes of Jackals.

‘Can we get there on foot?’ asked Molly, trying to take her mind off the possibility of a floatquake.

‘The undercity? We must walk part of the way,’ said Slowcogs. ‘The first portion of the journey will be through the atmospheric.’

He rolled up to a small felt-lined service capsule, opening a circular door at the flat rear of the metal plate. Inside lay none of the comforts of the passenger tubes – no velvet-cushioned seats or gas lights; just a small wooden bench at the opposite end of the carriage and leather straps on the wall holding bundles of esoteric-looking tools. Slowcogs entered the carriage after Molly, clanging the door shut and spinning a wheel to lock it.

There was a moment’s darkness and then a phosphorous strip lit the spine of the capsule with a witching green light.

‘Sit,’ advised Slowcogs, ‘and hold onto the ceiling strap.’

With a jolt the capsule was shunted through the rubber lock of the sending valve; when the flap closed, the other end of the chamber opened and the carrier capsule was on its way. Stilled for a second, the motorless carriage started to accelerate through the airless lead service tunnel as the pressure differential caught it.

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?’

‘Which of us does not, with age?’ answered Slowcogs. ‘No. He is a joining – a creature formed from steamman cadavers at the hands of one of your human mechomancers. His pattern has been violated, the architecture laid down by King Steam tampered with. Three souls of our fallen lay trapped within the corpses that make up his body by Onestack’s selfish refusal to deactivate. It is a great dishonour for him.’

Molly remembered her dream of the night before. ‘Poor Silver Onestack.’

‘So he hides himself away down here in the undercity. But he is still steamman. Word has been sent by the controller – if he is alive I hope he will meet us outside the town.’

‘Word?’ said Molly. ‘Surely there is no crystalgrid network down here?’

Slowcogs pointed towards the ceiling mist, where black dots rode the cavern thermals. ‘There are older ways to send a message, young softbody. Trained bird bats with leg clips do as well in the deeps.’

They travelled at a steady pace for the rest of the day, uneventfully except for when one of the mushroom trees rained spores down on them as they passed. Molly’s eyes swelled up like the crimson ball from a game of four-poles and she sneezed uncontrollably for another two miles. Apart from the odd spike of earthflow-fed lightning, the bright red light from the crystals high above them never varied or dimmed. It was always day in the Duitzilopochtli Deeps.

By the late afternoon the cavern floor started to slope upwards and the fungal forest began to grow less densely. The presence of fields of stumps in the dirt suggested heavy felling by the inhabitants of the undercity. Before the brow of a hill they came across a field of a different kind, the stone markers and headstones of a graveyard stretching back to the fungal forest.

‘This is where Silver Onestack will meet us, if he is still activate,’ said Slowcogs. The steamman rolled along a path towards a shrine at the corner of the graveyard. The temple looked as abandoned as the Chimecan structure Molly had slept in the night before, but with none of the half-human, half-insect effigies. She guessed the outlaw city, rather than the ancient fallen empire, had constructed the shrine. Peering inside its gloom, Molly saw a figure squatting on the floor. A steamman, as silent as one of the Guardian’s statues in Parliament Square.

‘Have you no greeting for us, Silver Onestack?’ asked Slowcogs.

Raising itself on a tripod of three pincer-like legs, the large spherical body of the creature rotated, a silver-domed head emerging from an iris on the globe. ‘I had hoped no greetings would be necessary, Slowcogs. Did the controller not receive my message?’

‘We did not wait for your reply,’ said Slowcogs. ‘The Geargi-ju wheels have been thrown.’

‘Then he has read badly, Slowcogs. Grimhope is not the place it once was. Whatever threat this softbody faces in Middlesteel, it is only a fraction of the disorder that now rules down here.’

Slowcogs rolled back. ‘I do not understand.’

‘Then let me show you,’ said Silver Onestack, his three legs scissoring him out of the temple. They reached the top of the hill and stared down into the valley.

Old Chimecan ziggurats lay dotted around the cavern floor overwhelmed by the towers of a human city, smoke rising from workshops and manufactories. It looked like the Jangles in Middlesteel viewed from the top of the hill at Rottonbow.

‘Where is the tree town?’ asked Slowcogs. ‘Where is the palisade and Lake Chalchiuhtlicue?’

‘Cut down. Built over. Drained,’ said Silver Onestack. ‘The Anarchy Council fell three years ago. What is left of its members rests behind you in those plots.’

‘You have not reported this,’ said Slowcogs, accusingly.

‘Rather, I have, but you have not received my messages. The new regime brought flying things with them, all teeth and claws. I lost my whole loft of bird bats within a week. You were lucky the controller’s communication got through to me at all. It is the first word from the people of the metal I have received for years.’

‘It is strange this has been kept from us,’ said Slowcogs. He was clearly not used to the knowledge of something on such a scale having escaped the attention of the steammen’s all-knowing network.

‘Stranger still that the new regime were instantly able to identify all of the political police’s informers down here,’ said Silver Onestack. ‘Those informers that still live now tell the Guardians on the surface whatever the new regime wish them to hear.’

Molly stared down at Grimhope, deeply disappointed. She had expected freedom to look different, not like a miniature replica of Middlesteel. But however bad it was, her murderous family would not be able to track her down here.

Silver Onestack passed Molly a green cloak with a large hood. ‘Wear this, Molly softbody. And if anyone speaks to you before we get to my lodgings, do not forget to address your reply with compatriot, not sir or damson.’

‘They are communityists?’ Molly asked.

‘Not any more,’ said Silver Onestack, looking back at the bone-white gravestones of the Anarchy Council. ‘No. Not any more.’

Chapter Seven

If Harry Stave was a typical criminal, then Oliver couldn’t understand how the constabulary had not captured him years ago. Since fleeing from the police station at Hundred Locks, all they had done was enter the woods to the south of the town, go into the middle of a clearing, and peg out a strange yellow flag with a black circle in the centre.

‘Now what?’ Oliver asked, watching the drizzle falling from the sky soak the odd-looking flag.

‘We wait,’ said Harry Stave.

‘For what?’

‘For three hours, old stick.’ said Harry.

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘I know.’

Oliver couldn’t goad any more out of him. So he shut up and waited. Someone must have discovered the bodies in the police station by now. The corpses at Seventy Star Hall on the other hand could take weeks to be found. Damson Griggs brought everything to the house; she would be noticed missing first by one of the nosy neighbours she was always complaining about. Or perhaps one of Uncle Titus’s businesses would send a runner to see what had happened to their reclusive owner.

Shortly after three hours had passed, a figure appeared on the other side of the clearing, shrouded by the curtain of rain – heavier now.

‘Who’s that?’ Oliver whispered.

‘If we’re lucky, our ticket out of here,’ said Harry.

‘Harry!’ the figure called.

Harry Stave stayed where he was, sheltered by the tree from the rain. ‘Monks! You’re not meant to be here. Where’s Landless?’

‘Reassigned,’ said Monks. ‘Who’s the boy?’

‘The whistler’s nephew. We need to extract, Monks. We’ve been rolled up here.’

Oliver was about to ask why his uncle was called the whistler, but Harry signalled him back.

‘Did you get to meet the walk-in, Harry?’

‘The walk-in didn’t show. That’s why I put up a signal. A rival crew arrived and nearly did for us. We’ve been bleeding rolled up, we need to get out now.’

‘That’s why I’m here, Harry. Come on.’

Stave shut his eyes, not moving. A shadow seemed to separate itself from the criminal, a spectral outline moving forward into the rain and across the clearing. To Oliver’s astonishment a similar figure misted out of his own skin, drifting after the Harry-ghost.

<Quiet.> Harry cautioned the boy. <We’re masked now under the tree. He can’t see us here.>

In the centre of the clearing two thunder cracks exploded, a lick of flame splashing through the apparitions and off into the trees on the left.

‘Damn,’ said Harry. ‘A marksman. I do hate to be proved right.’

They were running back into the forest, the man Monks shouting something after them.

‘That was your friend?’ Oliver wheezed as they darted through the trees.

‘An associate,’ said Harry. ‘It was a bleeding set-up. My own people.’

Another crack sounded beside them. Whoever it was, they were shooting into the trees blind.

Oliver ducked under a fallen oak. ‘You don’t sound surprised.’

‘Let’s just say I had my suspicions.’

Oliver pointed to the north. ‘The town’s that way I think.’

‘Too well covered by now,’ said Harry, pushing Oliver on. ‘And besides, I never like to go into a place without knowing where the back door is.’

They followed the sodden forest trail to the west, doubling back and switching trails to throw off any pursuit. The breeze lent a cold edge to the run. Since he had found Damson Griggs on the floor of their kitchen, sprinting about Hundred Locks was all Oliver seemed to have done. The shots into the trees had stopped.

‘Not coming after us,’ panted Oliver.

‘Not their style, Oliver,’ Harry replied. ‘My associates like to keep to the shadows. The minimum of fuss. They were going after an easy kill, not a forced march through half the county’s forests.’

They slowed their dash as they began to come across tracks, leaves and twigs scattered across the ground. A horse trail. Oliver tried to locate the sun beyond the trees’ canopy. By its position they were into the late afternoon now. Then, against the fast-moving white clouds, he saw it. A black globe rising into the sky.

‘Look, Harry. I’ve never seen an airship like that.’

Harry stared upwards. ‘Bloody Monks. That was our ride out of here.’

‘But there’s no expansion engines on it.’

‘Don’t need them to go up and down, Oliver. Which is pretty much all it does.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I’ll explain later. For now, let’s concentrate on our journey out of here.’

Harry’s route led them to what Oliver at first took for a river; then he saw the towpath and realized it was the tail end of the Hundred Locks navigation. If they followed the canal path north they would eventually reach the hundred locks carved into the dike wall of the Toby Fall Rise.

‘Keep back under the trees for the moment,’ cautioned Harry. ‘We need to stay in the black. See the tunnel in the hill? We’ll head for there, keeping under the tree line at all times. The towpath goes into the tunnel. We’ll get into the channel behind that bush growing down there on the left.’

Harry’s precise instructions left Oliver puzzled. ‘You think someone might be watching for us?’

‘Trust me,’ said Harry. ‘Someone’s always watching. Come on.’

They hugged the forest until the mouth of the canal tunnel was upon them. The bush extended all the way up the hill and pushing past it, Oliver scraped his neck against the sharp twigs that grew between its small orange flowers. It was cool inside the tunnel. Damp too. Harry sat down in front of a navvy’s alcove and dangled his feet over the edge of the waterway.

Oliver joined him. ‘Now we wait?’

‘Clever lad. You’ll go far.’

After half an hour the tunnel mouth darkened as the first of three nearly identical narrowboats entered, a single paddle at the rear of each boat tossing water across the towpath.

‘When the middle boat passes,’ instructed Harry, ‘jump for the cabin.’

Oliver did as he was bid – the narrowness of the tunnel and the slowness of the canal craft making it easy to step through the cloud of smoke and onto the deck. There was a steam-wreathed figure at the back, hand on the tiller, and if the canal man was surprised at the sudden addition of two passengers, he did not show it.

Harry pushed Oliver through the door into a narrow room. It looked like the inside of the gypsy caravans that visited Hundred Locks during the Midwinter Festival. ‘Right. We stay here for the rest of the day – don’t even think about getting out of the cabin until tomorrow morning.’

Oliver felt a wave of exasperation rise in him towards his enigmatic saviour. ‘Why, Harry? You think that strange-looking aerostat is going to be floating around looking for us? That’s a pile of horse manure – what’s the chances of us being spotted at that distance?’

Harry sighed. ‘More than you’d credit, old stick. It’s not human eyes you need to worry about. There’s watchers up there with transaction engines to assist them; but they can only focus on a single place at a time, and we’ll be outside of their sweep area by tomorrow.’

Oliver sat down on a small three-legged stool. ‘Harry, that sounds like paranoia.’

‘It’s only paranoia if they’re not out to get you, lad. And judging by our reception back in the woods, they are.’

‘But who are they?’

Harry sighed again and pulled up a stool. ‘Both myself and my associates back in the woods are what are colloquially known as wolftakers.’

Oliver snorted in disbelief. ‘Wolftakers? So you’re a demon who’s come to—’

‘—snatch naughty children, Oliver? Every myth has its substance in reality. The tale’s just a twisted version of the truth.’

‘You’re an escaped convict, Harry. I saw the paper on you in the police station.’

‘That’s true enough,’ said Harry. ‘Although I would prefer to be known as a free-spirited entrepreneur who ran afoul of the navy’s taste for bureaucracy and regulations.’

‘So what’s this nonsense about wolftakers in the sky? Next you’ll be telling me you help Mother White Horse give gifts to the children every Midwinter.’

‘Wolftakers are human enough,’ said Harry. ‘Listen. When Isambard Kirkhill seized power in parliament’s name, he had only one fear left – and that was the throne. The navy and army wanted him to become king. Old Isambard had to fight them off with a sabre to stop them making him the new monarch. Then there were our own royalists in exile in Quatérshift plotting a counter-revolution and restoration. Kirkhill knew that if the rule of parliament was to last, it would have to resist both the plots without and the ambitions of its own Guardians within the house.’

‘What does this have to do with a children’s tale?’ Oliver asked.

‘Everything,’ explained Harry. ‘Kirkhill established a court sinister as the last line of defence, a body that was to act as a supreme authority and ultimate guarantor of the rule of the people. But it was to be a court invisible. The House of Guardians knows the Court is there, but they know nothing of its location, its staff, its methods or its workings. If any First Guardian were to start looking at the throne restored with envious eyes, the existence of the Court would give them pause to think.’

‘But all the stories about demons?’

‘To those that wish ill to Jackals,’ said Harry, ‘we are demons. A conspiracy of Guardians is plotting a coup and one morning they wake up and their ringleader has disappeared – never seen again. A merchant starts taking Cassarabian gold to smuggle navy celgas across the border and his tent is found empty on the sands. The political police begin taking orders to stitch up the ballot, and one day the Police General’s river launch is found adrift empty on the Gambleflowers – no trace of the old sod. That sends a powerful message. We’re the ghosts in the machine, Oliver, keeping the game straight and hearts pure. The only thing they know about us is the name Kirkhill gave us – the Court of the Air; the highest bleeding court in the land.’

‘But the men who tried to kill us – who killed Uncle Titus?’

‘Your uncle was a whistler, Oliver. Part of the Court of the Air’s network of agents on the ground. He’d discovered something, something worth killing him for.’

‘Uncle Titus?’

‘He was one of the best. His people were all over: clipper crew, traders – Cassarabia, Quatérshift, Concorzia, the Catosian League and the Holy Kikkosico Empire, every county in Jackals from Chiltonshire to Ferniethian.’

‘All this time,’ said Oliver. ‘He was never one for talking, but—’

‘Part of the job, Oliver. He was recruited by the same man who saved my neck from the drop outside Bonegate, the greatest wolftaker of them all – Titus’s brother.’

‘But that would mean—’

‘Your father, Oliver. He was the wolftaker who trained me in the craft. Took my not insubstantial talents and gave them a purpose beyond diverting navy biscuits to the merchants on Penny Street.’

‘If you work for this court,’ said Oliver, ‘why would they be trying to kill you?’

‘It’s the old quandary. Who watches the watchmen? I’ve been coming across little things for a couple of years now, signs that someone in the Court is playing both sides of the field. Your uncle suspected the same thing. When our extraction became an ambush just now, those suspicions became a reality.’

‘Extraction?’

‘Craft talk. Laying the flag is called putting up a signal. Calling down an aerosphere to lift us out and take us up.’

‘The Court lives on an aerostat?’

‘Not an airship, Oliver. We’ve got an entire city up there in the sky now. Higher than any RAN high-lifter can reach, just the skraypers for company.’

‘And now they’re trying to kill you?’

‘Only some of them. They must have spiked poor old Landless and got Monks onto the aerosphere roster in his place. Never did trust Monks; not enough of a thief for my taste. Who to trust now, Oliver? Always a tricky one in the great game at the best of times. Now, let me think. If they’re acting in the open then they must have declared me rogue. They couldn’t blow an extraction and hope to cover it up. That means regulator-level intervention. Circle, the rot in the Court goes a lot higher than I’d thought.’

‘And the phoney police in the station at Hundred Locks?’ said Oliver.

‘Someone’s dogs,’ said Harry. ‘But not the Court of the Air’s. We’ve got a military arm called the incrementals for the hard slap work. Proper killers. If they had come after us neither of us would be alive to be discussing it now. So, so, who to trust?’

‘Can I trust you, Harry?’

‘Trust him with your life but not your wallet.’ The voice sounded from the narrowboat’s doorway. The steam-shrouded steersman from earlier. Rising no higher than Oliver’s chest, his earless, whisker-bristled face buried beneath heavy rolls of leathery brown skin, the master of their canal boat was a grasper.

‘Armiral, you old rascal.’ Harry stood up to greet the grasper. ‘Room for a couple of stowaways?’

‘Is he a whistler?’ Oliver whispered to Harry.

<Armiral? Circle no. He’s one of my murky acquaintances. Too valuable to waste on Court business. You might say I’ve been saving Armiral for a rainy day. You never know when you’re going to need to retire from the great game.>

‘We’re running for the Julking Way navigation,’ said the grasper. ‘Should reach the outskirts of Turnhouse by tomorrow. You’ll be letting me know where we’re heading after that?’

‘I expect so,’ said Harry.

The grasper looked like he was going to say something, then shook his head and went back outside.

‘It was stolen naval supplies that paid for the Chaunting Lay,’ said Harry, winking at Oliver. ‘That’s the boat we’re sitting on. Of course, the payment was somewhat indirect.’

‘Someone’s got to move those biscuits around,’ said Oliver.

‘You’re a fast lad, Oliver Brooks, and no mistake. Your blood shows through, all right.’

‘Father. And all these years I thought he was in the same trade as Uncle Titus.’

‘He was,’ said Harry. ‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘Was he a good man?’ Oliver asked.

‘Good enough for the times we were dealt,’ said Harry. ‘I won’t lie to you Oliver. There was a brutal edge to Phileas Brooks. If he thought you were playing him false or were coming against him direct, he could be a ruthless sort. But he did alright by me, and there was none better among the wolftakers.’

‘The things he must have seen,’ said Oliver. ‘The things he must have done in the service of Jackals. Only to die in an aerostat accident. How utterly pointless.’

‘An accident? Perhaps,’ said Harry. ‘I always had my doubts about that.’

‘What? You don’t think—’

‘They’re just suspicions, Oliver. Your airship came down during the start of the not-so-glorious revolution of 1566, quickly followed by the Two-Year War with the Commonshare. The Court of the Air had its hands full making sure Benjamin Carl’s committeemen disappeared. Now my capacity in the navy may only have been in the Victualling Board, but I know enough about the job of an airmaster to understand that if you’ve got an expansion engine fire, you don’t plot a course that will take you anywhere near the feymist curtain.’

Oliver’s eyes were red. ‘And I was the only survivor.’

‘The only one that was ever found, old stick. The only one that was ever found. Unless you know different?’

‘Not that I remember, Harry.’

‘Let’s put your memory to the test,’ said Harry. ‘Titus never got around to telling me what he had discovered; he was waiting for someone from down south to turn up before letting me in on it. But instead we got those two phoney crushers from Ham Yard and the toppers at the hall. I’d say that whoever Titus was expecting to arrive was intercepted by the same crew that tried to do for us and most likely done away with. Any idea who your uncle’s visitor could have been?’

Oliver mulled the question over. ‘Uncle asked me to meet you at the aerostat field last week, but he didn’t mention anything about anybody else arriving. The next airship isn’t due at Hundred Locks for four days either.’

‘Let’s try something else,’ said Harry, pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. ‘It’s like when I talk with my voice inside your skull, except everything flows in the opposite direction. I might be able to pick up clues from your memories.’

‘More worldsinger tricks?’

‘Of a sort. Although the people that trained us aren’t in the order, which wouldn’t please the worldsingers one jot if they ever found out. One of the reasons they dislike the fey so much is they don’t like the bleeding competition.’

Harry placed his left palm in front of Oliver’s forehead and shut his eyes, straining to make contact with the boy’s thoughts. Oliver expected to feel something, a tingle, or a pressure, perhaps a headache, but there was nothing.

‘Now that’s a first,’ said Harry. ‘I can’t establish a lock with you. But you can hear my mind-echo, yes?’

‘Like you were talking an inch away from my ear, Harry.’

Oliver thought back to the inactive truth crystal at the police station. Something appeared to be protecting him from worldsinger probing. Was there already something fey, dangerous and defensive developing inside him like a tumour, ready to erupt and twist his body in terrible, unnatural ways? Perhaps old Pullinger had been right all along, Oliver would be better off with a torc around his neck and kept under close observation by the order.

‘Damn queer, Oliver. Well, there’s some that can resist a glamour; though you’re the first I’ve ever met in the flesh. We’ll just have to do this the old-fashioned way. Are there any visitors you can remember arriving for Titus in the last few months?’

‘A handful,’ said Oliver. ‘A skipper back from the Holy Kikkosico Empire. Runners from the crystalgrid station with tape. The head clerk from uncle’s Middlesteel counting house came at the start of the month as usual.’

‘Anybody uncommon?’

Oliver racked his brains. ‘Back in Barn-month we had an old grasper visit twice. Once at the start of the month, once at the end.’

‘Old?’ said Harry. ‘Older than Armiral here?’

‘The spine-hair on his face was white and his cheeks looked like a field of snow, except where he had this mark on his right cheek.’

‘A tattoo?’ asked Harry.

‘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

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?’

‘I am outside the fold, Molly softbody,’ said Onestack. ‘King Steam makes use of my vision glass and hearing folds when it suits him, but my pattern is not to any plan laid by the architects royal in the Steammen Free State. Above ground, not a single one of my kind would share boiler-grade coke with me.’

‘Were you built in Middlesteel?’ asked Molly.

‘I was not built, Molly softbody. I was scavenged, cannibalized from the parts of other steammen,’ said Silver Onestack. ‘Your mechomancers cannot build us, but they still hope to understand our bodies by desecrating the corpses of our fallen. There are steammen souls trapped inside me, blended to make that which I am. I hear them during my thoughtflow, crying, begging me to release them.’

‘By dying,’ said Molly.

‘Yes,’ said Onestack. ‘By returning to the great pattern. I carry my own ancestors inside me and every step I take is a dishonour to them, but I cannot bear to deactivate. Life is too full, even down here. There is the beauty of the ceiling storms. The satisfaction of making whole that which is broken. The smells of the forest when the spores eject and cover the ground like snowfall. So instead of dying I live down here in the belly of the earth like a coward, showing my face to no brother of the metal, keeping my own company.’

Molly lit the stove in the corner of the room. ‘How did the mechomancer get his hands on so many bodies?’

‘There was a tower collapse,’ said Onestack. ‘Blimber Watts, the pneumatics gave way.’

Molly nearly dropped her coal shovel. ‘Silver Onestack, I was there! It was a steamman who rescued me from the ruins.’

‘Then you understand, Molly softbody.’

‘Yes. Yes, I suppose I do.’

‘The steamman who rescued you would have been looking for our corpses as well as survivors, to bring peace to our souls before scavengers looted the metal dead. By Steelbhalah-Waldo, we are as brother and sister under our shell. You must see my work, you will understand.’

Molly watched Onestack’s tripod legs knife across the floor, then he unlocked a small wooden door behind a curtain. ‘Come.’

Silver Onestack led her up a narrow staircase and into a loft room. The room was piled with canvas paintings – all in monochrome – otherworldly scenes of the crystal light falling through the forest, a solitary figure sitting cross-legged under a fluted mushroom. In all the paintings the same figure stood indistinct, lonely: by a window painted from outside, small against the stretch of a building or walking isolated by the shore of a subterranean lake.

Molly ran her fingers over the texture of the paint. ‘You always use the same model.’

‘She is not a model,’ said Silver Onestack. ‘I see her in the distance, often. I am not sure who she is. A shade of one of the dead from Blimber Watts, perhaps. Or a ghost image stuck in my vision glass after the softbody mechomancer put me back together.’

‘They are beautiful,’ said Molly.

‘I am the only steamman I have heard of who has ever painted,’ said Silver Onestack. ‘If I ever find the courage to deactivate, perhaps these works will survive me. Something of me will be left, that was not stolen from the souls of my pattern kin.’

Molly rested the canvas she was looking at back on the floor. ‘It’s not cowardly to want to live, Silver Onestack.’

‘My life keeps three souls in torment, withheld from the great pattern. I have no illusions about the cost of my own survival.’

‘Neither of us seems to be popular with our families, Silver Onestack.’

‘Yes,’ said the steamman. ‘It could not have been easy to be raised without pattern kin inside a poorhouse.’

Molly sighed. ‘No, it was not. In Sun Gate we looked out for each other and made as much of a family as we could. But I can’t fool myself and say it was the same as having a mother and father who you knew loved you, who would do anything for you. When I walked the streets of Middlesteel there were days when all I would see were fathers and mothers out with their children. Holding hands. Laughing, doing things together. I would always wonder what was the matter with me, not to have that; there must have been something wrong with me to be abandoned. Do you only paint in black and white, old steamer?’

Onestack pointed to his silver-domed head. ‘The mechomancer who put me together lacked the skill to do anything else with my sight. I remember from my old bodies what it was like to see in colour, though. I think I sometimes thoughtflow in colour, especially red. Apples are red, aren’t they?’

Molly nodded. Silver Onestack opened an iron door to his spherical main body, exposing a maze of crystals, boards, silicate and clockwork mechanisms. ‘I went to King Steam and begged him to give me back my sight the way it was before, but he refused. He said the law forbade the people of the metal to deactivate me, but he would not suffer the undead to be given succour or repair.’

Something about the workings seemed out of place to Molly. A wrongness that she could feel inside her as a tangible ache. She reached inside Onestack’s open hatch, repositioning boards and switching valve groups.

‘Molly softbody, desist,’ the steamman protested. ‘It is forbidden for those outside the people of the metal to tamper with our bodies.’

‘What is this?’ demanded Slowcogs, rolling into the loft garret. ‘This is an offence in the eyes of Steelbhalah-Waldo. Molly, you must cease this violation immediately.’

Molly withdrew her hands and shut the casing plate. ‘Onestack was broken. I could not bear it.’

Onestack’s voicebox sounded in amazement. ‘The floor is brown! Dried fungus wood. And Molly softbody, your hair is red – as red as any apple. I can see in colour again. By all the saints of the Steamo Loas, you have restored my vision glass to see in colour!’

‘How can this be?’ Slowcogs asked. ‘Molly softbody, you are no mechomancer or draughtsman from the hall of architects.’

‘It just looked wrong,’ Molly explained. ‘My hands knew what to do.’

Silver Onestack spun his head to look at Slowcogs. ‘Slowcogs, has Molly softbody read the wheels?’

‘In the controller’s presence,’ said Slowcogs. ‘The pattern of Gear-gi-ju was revealed to Redrust.’

‘I just knew what to do,’ said Molly. ‘I have always had an affinity for such things.’

‘This is no normal affinity, Molly softbody,’ exclaimed Silver Onestack. ‘Oh Slowcogs, you fool of an old boiler. To bring this softbody down here, of all places. This nest of villainy and chaos. You should have sent her to King Steam with an escort of steammen knights to guard her precious soul.’

‘What are you two old steamers talking about?’ said Molly.

Silver Onestack’s tripod of legs had collapsed his large spherical body onto the floor. ‘What a turning of the pattern this is. A foolish old boiler and a walking corpse to protect her.’

‘I can bloody well protect myself,’ said Molly. ‘It’s all I’ve been doing since I could walk.’

Molly was about to demand an explanation when a fierce banging sounded on their door. Onestack arched up like a spider and opened a skylight to peer down into the street.

‘Who is it?’ asked Slowcogs, his voicebox volume on low.

‘The committeewoman for our street and the others nearby. A political, an informer.’

Other men and women in crimson cloaks were walking up and down the street smashing on doors. ‘Rouse yourselves, compatriots,’ shouted the woman outside. ‘Mandatory loyalty display in the main square. Our district has been selected. It is a glorious day.’

‘We must go,’ said Onestack. ‘The brilliant men will search all the buildings. Any malingerers will be executed.’

Out in the street dozens of locals had spilled out from their quarters, more arriving every minute, green hoods hiding their faces in shadow. The only sound was the dull thump of workshop cutting machines from the next street over.

‘Come,’ said the committeewoman. ‘Come.’

Everywhere they went red-hooded figures were rousting the citizens of Grimhope out from their homes. The woman led them through the subterranean streets to Grimhope’s central square, built on a scale to rival Middlesteel’s Hope Park – but with the unfinished patina and dust of recent construction hanging over it. Standard bearers holding aloft flags – red fields marked with a gold triangle – marched out to look over the scene. The subdued disposition of the people in the square was replaced by an electric anticipation. More and more townspeople were arriving, until an outlaw host enveloped the granite flagstones.

Molly had to cling onto Slowcogs’ iron hand to stop her being separated from the steamman by the crush of the rally. Silver Onestack sat in front of them like a beached slipsharp, his tripod of legs partially retracted inside his body.

‘Is he here yet?’ one of the crowd asked Molly.

‘Who?’

‘Tzlayloc,’ said the outlaw townsman. ‘Who else?’

‘There,’ called one of the mob. A figure had walked out onto the podium, throwing back his crimson hood. He slowly raised his arms and a hush fell over the crowd.

‘My people,’ the voice boomed across the open space. ‘I look across you all assembled here and I see an army of equals – of brothers and sisters – of compatriots standing with a common purpose.

‘Look at the person next to you. There are no mill-owners here. No landlords or kings or guardians. Nobody to call you tenant or subject or slave. And why is that?’

‘Because we are equal,’ the crowd yelled back.

‘Everything here belongs to the commons – to you,’ the man called Tzlayloc rumbled. ‘And compatriot, everything that is you belongs to the commons.’

The crowd screeched their approval. Molly could not believe the speed at which the rally had turned from an apprehensive flock to a mob running at fever pitch. It was as if a glamour had been cast over the crowd.

‘When another man, another woman, gives you the right to vote, says they give you freedom, they are making you a present of that which you already have – that which you were born with. And by so doing they make a grateful slave of you.’

‘We are not slaves,’ someone yelled back.

‘No. No, we are not. Compatriots, we stand together, a perfect commonshare. No poppy taller than the next, stealing the sun, casting their neighbour into the shadow, sucking up the goodness of the earth while letting their neighbour wither and die. Are we equal?’

The crowd roared in near-perfect unison: ‘We are!’

‘Compatriots, let me show you our heroes of society, those who lead by example.’

At his signal, a man hobbled onto the stage, one of his legs glinting steel in the red subterranean light. ‘Many of you know me,’ said the newcomer. ‘I am Ikey Solomon, once the fastest dipper in Middlesteel. And when the crushers finally came to take me away and transport me to the Concorzian colonies, I ran all the way down to Grimhope.’

The crowd cheered his defiance.

‘But I was not equal. I could run from one end of the Deeps to the other in eight hours, and then drink a yard of ale. Not one of you people here today could match me.’

The crowd murmured darkly at his incorrect boasting.

‘So I have had my left leg equalized. Look.’ He raised the limb from the ground. ‘The bones have been fixed with steel pins. I am equal in my speed to you. I am the Commonshare – and you are me. Now when we run, we shall run together, not against each other!’

The crowd went into an apoplexy of delight at Compatriot Solomon’s sacrifice.

‘Compatriot, you have shown the way,’ said Tzlayloc. ‘But he is not alone. Step forward, Sister Peggotty.’

A short woman came though the crimson-hooded honour guard, holding the hand of a boy – no older than nine or ten years in Molly’s estimation.

‘There are many of you here, who might have once frequented the gambling pits on Stalside,’ she began. Laughter sounded from the crowd.

‘Those that did would have seen my son play the boards there … two jump-stones, chess, round circle’s move. In the old days, the pit owners used my son like a magnet to empty the pockets of the desperate and the addicted. They called him a prodigy – able to beat any of you at a game of skill or chance. Exploited him like an angler’s lure. But look at him now …’

The boy stared uncomprehendingly out at the rally, drool running down the left side of his chin.

‘Compatriots, now he has been cured. Equalized. Now he is one of us. By the grace of our own renegade worldsingers his mind has been adjusted. Why, any of you could play him at a game of your choice and beat him as oft as not.’

The mob roared their approval.

‘Which of you here will show your devotion?’ exclaimed the mother. ‘Which of you will show your love for your compatriots?’

A young girl pushed her way past Molly. ‘I will! Tzlayloc, take me. I am beautiful and it is nothing but a curse to me. Scar my face with acid from the workshops.’

‘No.’ A giant of a man rose out of the crowd. ‘Tzlayloc, look how strong I am. Make me equal, cut off one of my ugly beef-hooks of an arm.’

‘Compatriots.’ Tzlayloc waved the supplicants back down. ‘Your willingness to join our Commonshare is a credit to you all. But not everyone shares our beliefs. While we live free down here our brothers and sisters still toil under the yoke of Middlesteel’s barons of commerce and the false idolatry of a sham ballot every four years. Bring forward the corrupt ones, compatriots.’

The red-cloaked soldiers – the brilliant men – moved forward with two struggling figures in white togas.

‘These evil leeches …’ Tzlayloc’s voice echoed off the square’s walls. ‘These two evil leeches come to visit us from as far away as the city-states of the Catosian League. Why? To benefit from us! To profit.’

There was a collective rush of breath from the crowd.

‘Please,’ one of the Catosian traders begged. ‘Last year you needed high-tension boilers from us for your mills, parts and plans for automatics. We brought them to you. For mercy’s sake, let me live. I have a family who need me, three girls and a baby boy.’

‘Listen to these philosophers,’ Tzlayloc mocked. ‘To feed their families they would suck our blood. Is that not the excuse of the vampires on the surface? Just a little trade, just a little blood – work for me, not for each other. Work for me, not for the commons. Make me fat. Make me rich. Let me show you a new philosophy, men of Catosia.’

Tzlayloc drew an obsidian-handled knife – the blade sharpened stone. His crimson-hooded retinue dragged the two traders to an altar where they were arched back and strapped thrashing and sobbing to the stone. Tzlayloc thrust aloft the knife.

‘In life, you leeched blood from the people you should have cared for. Now, in death, your sacrifice will strengthen the people’s sinews and advance their cause. Xam-ku, Father Spider, hear my prayer – let the sacrifice of these two rats caught with their snouts buried in our grain bins swell your power and speed your return. Too long have we laboured under the yoke of slave master and merchant and market without the light of Wildcaotyl to guide us.’

‘Look away, Molly softbody,’ advised Onestack.

Molly did, but she couldn’t shut out the screams echoing from the walls of the square as Tzlayloc carved the traders’ beating hearts out of their still living bodies. Tzlayloc held the still pulsing organs above the crowd. ‘Xam-ku, feel the nourishment of their souls.’

The crystals in the cavern ceiling came alive with lightning, crimson fire arcing between the stones above them. Down in the square the crowd chanted their saviour’s name.

‘The old gods of Wildcaotyl have not fed in a long time,’ said Slowcogs.

‘I can feel their hunger,’ said Molly. ‘Welling up beneath the ground. The souls spilled are like the taste of meat for a slipsharp that hasn’t fed in a thousand years.’

Blood from the two limp bodies was coursing down channels in the stone. ‘In death,’ Tzlayloc bellowed, ‘these two corrupt vampires have made the sacrifice to their companions they were never willing to make in life. Behold, I have found their centre, and it nourishes the commons.’

Molly tried to turn away from the scene, but the press of the chanting mob was too fierce.

‘Our compatriots in Quatérshift feed such as they into the Gideon’s Collar, but in their admirable drive for efficiency, they have forgotten the wisdom of our ancestors. Wasting good souls which could be dedicated to Xam-ku,’ said Tzlayloc. ‘Yet in Middlesteel above, the streets still throng with the oppressors of the people, the enemy inside our walls, withholding paradise from the hands of the starving, the propertyless and desperate. Shall we make a land of equals? Shall we free the people?’

‘Yes!’ the crowd roared.

‘Shall we pull the selfish bloodsuckers down into the gutter and thrash them until the streets of Middlesteel run red with their blood?’

‘Yes, yes, yes!’ the crowd howled.

‘Now you see,’ whispered Silver Onestack. ‘Now you see why you were wrong to come here. Grimhope has died. This rotting carcass of a city is all that is left of the legend.’

Slowcogs bowed his head. ‘Forgive me, Silver Onestack. I did not know.’

‘No,’ said Molly. ‘This is not your fault, Slowcogs. I was meant to come here. I have seen this madness before, or something like it.’

Slowcogs’ head sunk in shame. ‘There is a song in your blood, Molly softbody, and the memory of your cells points the way you must travel.’

But where have I seen this before? Molly asked herself as they drifted away from the square. Where?

Molly and the two steammen had only just arrived back at Onestack’s lodgings when the political organizer who had dragged them to the rally appeared at the door. She banged on the front of the workshop. ‘Token day, compatriot metal, token day.’

Silver Onestack opened the door. ‘Enter, compatriot soft-body.’

‘Such a gathering, compatriot metal. Such a show of equality. The day is coming when the dogs on the surface will whine under the weight of our boots, surely it is.’

‘Surely,’ Silver Onestack mouthed.

‘Your ledger, compatriot.’

Onestack led the way into the room at the back of the workshop, picked up a dusty book of accounts and handed it to the woman, saying nothing as she leafed through the last few pages. ‘Excellent, compatriot metal. The communal share is now set at ninety per cent. The state will receive its share now.’

‘So much?’ said Onestack. ‘I have two assistants now. The girl must eat. We need boiler-grade coke.’

‘Careful what you say, compatriot metal,’ warned the woman. ‘Those words smack of shirking and defeatism. Your talent with matters mechanical has kept your position on the reserved list, but the mills are hungry for labour too.’

‘My apologies, compatriot softbody,’ said Onestack. ‘Perhaps you could put a word in for us with the committee of supplies for two extra food chits.’

The woman’s tone softened as Slowcogs handed over a bag of coins. ‘I know your contribution to the commons is hard, compatriot metal. But the struggle always is. Your gift to the cause is helping us forge hammers of freedom to strike down the tyrants and leeches.’

‘We’ll eat well when the tyrants are struck down,’ said Molly.

The woman failed to notice the sarcasm in Molly’s tone. ‘You’re not old enough to remember the famine of Sixty-six, young compatriot. I lost my husband at Haggswood Field when the crushers charged us. My young ones died of hunger when I was locked away in Bonegate for breach of the riot act, nobody in my lodgings with the food or the inclination to feed them. Everything I ever valued and loved was taken away from me by the quality of Middlesteel. All except my freedom. One day we’ll see the light of the surface again, compatriot, and the day will be ours.’

‘I doubt it,’ said a green-hooded figure coming down the stairs leading up to Onestack’s loft.

‘What! How did you get into my workshop?’ Onestack demanded of the intruder.

The figure leant on a cane and Molly felt a sinking feeling strike her stomach.

‘Perhaps you forgot to lock your door?’ said the figure removing his hood. It was him. The refined old killer from Fairborn and Jarndyce; somehow the topper had caught up with Molly, even down here in Grimhope. ‘But then one imagines the concept of a propertyless state rather negates the need for locks, would you not agree, compatriot?’

‘Which district are you from?’ spat the political. ‘And who are you to question the word of the revolution?’

‘Why the district of Vauxtion,’ said the old gentleman. ‘And once I carried a marshal’s baton. So I do hope you will forgive my small observation that the earnestness of your hod carriers is not going to prove much of a shield against navy fin-bombs falling from a Jackelian airship.’

‘What are you rambling about, old goat?’ said the woman. ‘There is no Vauxtion district in Grimhope.’

‘I see, damson, that your knowledge of geography is as tired as your rhetoric. Vauxtion is – or should I say, was – a province of Quatérshift. No doubt it bears a drearier label now. Area twelve of the Commonshare, or a similarly tedious designation. Something of a personal inconvenience for myself, given that I bear the title of the Count of Vauxtion.’

‘An aristo!’

He placed his cane on the workshop counter and was walking slowly towards the woman. ‘Indeed, an aristocrat. Although rest assured, your Carlist colleagues in my land have done their best to rid themselves of my kind. I saw my retainers, wife, children and grandchildren marched into a Gideon’s Collar by a mob of your self-righteous compatriots.’

The political at last recognized the old man’s air of menace and broke for the front room. As she did so a pepperbox-nozzled gas pistol appeared in the count’s hand, and as quick as it did, the woman was collapsing to the floor within a cloud of vapour.

‘A tip for you, damson,’ said the count, standing over the corpse. ‘The best way to evade famine is not to seize the breadbasket of the continent, leave her fields un harvested for two years of revolution, then fire a bolt through the neck of every disfavoured soul who knows anything about agriculture.’

Slowcogs powered towards the old assassin from behind, wheels spinning over the fungus-wood boards. In one smooth movement Count Vauxtion knelt and drew a double-barrelled harpoon gun from his back, the black claw smashing into Slowcogs’ mid-body. Sidestepping, the count watched Slowcogs trundle to a stop by the workshop door, hissing steam from his punctured boiler heart soaking the floor.

Molly was immediately by Slowcogs’ side as the count covered her with his gas gun.

‘I am sorry, Molly softbody,’ wheezed Slowcogs. ‘I have failed you.’

‘No, Slowcogs,’ said Molly, tears welling in her eyes. ‘This is my fault. I led us down here.’

‘Oh, please.’ Count Vauxtion threw a set of rusty Gear-gi-ju wheels on the floor. ‘You might as well blame Guardian Rathbone station’s controller. Do you know how difficult it is to torture a steamman mystic? They can shut down their pain centres at will. I had to find a specialist to break your friend down to a state where he was willing to tell me where to find you.’

‘You softbody barbarian,’ cursed Silver Onestack. ‘May the Steamo Loas blight you for your evil.’

Count Vauxtion casually shot one of Onestack’s legs off with the remaining barrel of his harpoon weapon. With only two sides left on Onestack’s tripod the ponderous steamman bowled over, beached in his own workshop. He tried to stand, slipped, then lost consciousness, his valves overwhelmed by the pain.

‘Hardly a barbarian,’ Count Vauxtion said to the immobile steamman. ‘The controller described you as a mad old boiler scratching art with peck blood and fungus water, but he lacked the sensitivity or the reference points to adequately describe your works. They are magnificent, steamman. As one artist to another, I shall leave you your arms and sight. Call it a professional courtesy. I have taken the liberty of taking one of your miniatures as payment; the scene of the girl against the canyon wall.’

Molly took a step towards the stairs, but the gas gun was instantly pointing at her. A rubber pipe from its handle dangled like a cobra from the count’s sleeve. ‘Please, Molly. My commission requires you to be delivered alive. And there are no chimney stacks in Grimhope for you to shin up.’

‘Alive!’ Molly spat. ‘An invitation to supper would have been cheaper.’

‘Not to mislead you, my sweet. I have the feeling my present patron will not be leaving you in that state for long.’

‘You tell my stepfather to go to hell.’

‘Stepfather?’ The count seemed amused. ‘Perhaps, although I doubt it. My current patron prefers to hold to his anonymity, so I can’t speak as to his motives or cause. Not that it really matters. I do not participate in causes any more. I spent most of my life following that course and all it bought me was a cemetery full of friends, family and fallen comrades.’

‘Let me help Slowcogs,’ Molly implored.

The count shook his head. ‘You are too slippery a catch, my dear. And I aimed for your friend’s boiler. Put your hood on and say your goodbyes. Bear in mind anyone you try to warn on our journey out of Grimhope will be dead before you close your beautiful lips, as will you. My patron will pay more for you alive, but dead will do almost as well.’

Molly tried to reach out to the steamman as the count pushed her towards the door. ‘Slowcogs.’

‘Follow your pattern, Molly softbody,’ whispered the dying metal creature. ‘Wherever it may take you.’

Standing outside, Molly tried to punch the topper. ‘You’ve bloody killed him.’

‘I led twenty thousand of my own soldiers to the slaughter at Morango,’ said the count. ‘And I loved them. One more, one less – just a number, Damson Templar, just another number in a forgotten ledger no one is numerate enough to read anymore.’

Producing a key, the count locked the door to the workshop. In the street a fat man approached them, puffing. ‘Is compatriot metal not in?’

‘The excitement of the rally was too much for him, compatriot,’ said the count. ‘He is taking the rest of the day off.’

‘But there’s a broken extraction belt at mill twenty! What shall I tell my committeeman?’

‘Tell him?’ the count, said. ‘Tell him that compatriot metal is currently putting a couple of his legs up for a while.’

Getting into Grimhope with a well-known boiler like Silver Onestack had been relatively simple. The crimson-hooded guards blocking their path showed that leaving with Count Vauxtion was not going to be so easy.

‘Papers of travel, compatriot,’ said one of the soldiers.

‘There have been reports of a pride of pecks attacking the farms,’ said the count. ‘Productivity will suffer. The committee demands answers.’

‘Pecks are always dragging off spore hands, compatriot. We’d have more luck farming the black-furred little buggers instead. But it’s your papers of travel I need to see if you want to go on a picnic with bright eyes here.’

‘But of course,’ said the count. He reached inside his cloak as an explosion lifted the roof off a mill in the bottom of the valley.

‘Sweet Tuitzilopochtli!’

‘Stay here,’ the sergeant shouted at one of the men. ‘The rest of you with me. It could be counter-revolutionaries from the Anarchy Council.’

Count Vauxtion smiled at the remaining guard. ‘And where would any good revolution be without its counter-revolutionaries?’

‘You stay put, compatriot,’ scowled the guard. ‘Until we’ve sorted out what’s happening in town you ain’t going nowhere.’

‘Hardly very fraternal, compatriot,’ said the count, bending down to pick something up from the cavern floor. ‘As for the mill, I think you’ll find someone rather carelessly turned the water system off on one of the boilers. See here, a worm.’

‘Do I look like I bleeding care?’

Molly tried to pull away, but the count pushed her back. ‘It’s a matter of philosophical niceties, compatriot. My own personal form of equalization, although where I come from it’s called a vendetta.’ Vauxtion’s hand shot up and a blast of gas spurted into the guard’s face. The brilliant man collapsed to the ground as if an axe had felled him and the count tossed the worm contemptuously on his body. ‘See, compatriot. I have made you equal to both my family and these toiling gardeners of the soil. May the worms enjoy the meal.’

‘You murderous old goat,’ Molly shouted. ‘You don’t care who you kill.’

The count waved his gas gun in the direction of the fungal forest. ‘Quite the opposite, my sweet. Shall we go for our picnic?’

‘I—’ Molly flinched back as a boot came down from the sky, flashing past her cheek, and sending the count sprawling over the corpse of the dead guard. The breath whooshed out of her as an arm rammed her spine, encircling her, tossing her into the air and onto a wicker floor. She gazed up stunned into a craynarbian face.

‘Ver’fey!’

‘I told you it was her,’ said Ver’fey.

Standing behind the craynarbian was a large woman, the sleeves of her shirt cut short, massive tanned arms jutting out. The same arms that had just seized Molly and lifted her from the ground. She looked oddly familiar.

Molly rolled off her back and onto her feet. She was in a wicker gondola hardly larger than a boat; above her was a sausage-shaped canvas. A miniature aerostat. Beyond the woman a man stood holding the tiller of a pivot-mounted expansion engine. Molly swayed for a second, dazed, and looked back towards the ground.

Count Vauxtion was a small dot on the edge of the fungal forest.

‘Molly.’ The craynarbian steadied her human friend. ‘Are you hurt?’

‘Back,’ said Molly. ‘I need to get back to Grimhope.’

‘You’re joking, kid,’ said the woman with the muscled arms. ‘Those asylum rejects would shoot us down as soon as look at us.’

‘I have friends down there,’ protested Molly.

‘Then make new ones, because we’re heading for the surface.’

‘Ver’fey,’ said Molly, ‘in Circle’s name what are you doing here? Can’t you tell her to put us down on the ground?’

Ver’fey shook her armoured skull, pointing to the man tending the expansion engine. ‘I told him where to find you, Molly, and I said I would come along to help them identify you.’

She turned to face the engine man, his thin hair whipping in the backdraft from the propeller.

‘My apologies, Molly,’ he said. ‘We have risked too much to find you to risk losing you back in Grimhope.’

‘A thank you would be nice, kid,’ added the woman. ‘I doubt if the count’s intentions towards you were any more altruistic than they normally are.’

‘You know him?’ said Molly. ‘Who are you people?’

‘We’ve run into each other before, kid, the count and myself. Normally at high speed.’

‘Don’t you recognize her, Molly?’ asked Ver’fey. ‘From the books at Sun Gate?’

Of course – the penny dreadful cover illustrations. A tanned woman with gorilla-sized arms sweeping across a ravine in a Liongeli jungle, clutching a massive purple gem stolen from a temple.

‘Amelia Harsh,’ said Molly.

‘Professor Harsh,’ corrected the woman.

‘What are you doing down here?’

‘The best I can, kid. But if you mean why are we pulling your scrawny frame out of Grimhope, you can talk to the money.’ She pointed to the man by the expansion engine.

‘Money?’

Professor Harsh shrugged. ‘Poking around the ruins of Chimeca doesn’t come cheap. This boat might be theirs, but what the university pays me doesn’t cover half of my work.’

‘Why are we here, Molly?’ said the money, sadly, ‘Because someone in Middlesteel is offering a fortune for your body – alive preferred, but dead perfectly acceptable.’

Chapter Nine

Analyst Ninety-one pretended not to have noticed the newcomer standing outside the door to Lady Riddle’s office. She casually shuffled the punch cards for the afternoon’s transaction engine load as Analyst Two-eighty slotted them into a pneumatic tube container.

‘It is him,’ said Two-eighty, her voice low.

‘I thought he would be taller,’ whispered Ninety-one. But she didn’t sound disappointed.

It was the signature tweed cap that really settled it. He looked like he might have just walked in from a day’s grouse shooting on some green limestone pile in the uplands.

‘Eyes front and centre,’ ordered Regulator Nine as she walked past the processing station. They busied themselves as the regulator went up to him.

‘Lord Wildrake, the Advocate General will see you now.’

Shutting the door on the calculation hall, the regulator ushered the visitor into a private chamber, a vista of thick armoured crystal glass overlooking the still sky-reaches of the troposphere. It was always calm here, so high; the Court of the Air floating far above the storm systems and the worries of the Jackelians below. He stood a moment, watching the smaller aerostats patrolling beyond the tethered spheres and globes. Razor-finned and tipped with long pulse barbs, their exclusive purpose was to drive off any skraypers that floated too close to the city.

He took off his cloak and hung it on a hook next to the marble head of Isambard Kirkhill, then clicked his heels to announce his presence to Lady Riddle.

At the other end of the room, the light and the space of the office offset the ebony skin of the Advocate General perfectly. No doubt as was intended.

‘Take a seat,’ said Lady Riddle.

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?’

‘I haven’t started to change yet.’

‘Pah,’ spat the Whisperer. ‘Dreams are about the truth, Oliver. They are a door through which denial is rarely allowed admittance. Ask yourself this question: why does your mind, your perfect mind which can slew off worldsinger truth-hexing and mind-walking like water off a duck’s feathers, why does it still allow me entry into your dreams?’

‘I—’ Oliver had not anticipated the question.

‘Think on it, Oliver. I like it in here, Oliver – your mind is by far the best. Lovely detail. Perfect clarity. It isn’t as easy to make contact with the normals. But I have been bearing up, Oliver. I’ve been minding the shop for the both of us. The places I’ve been – even steammen minds; like wading through a stream of broken glass, riding one of the metal’s thoughtflows.’

‘And in your travels,’ said Oliver, ‘have you found anything more practical than obscure warnings about Harry Stave?’

‘Oh, I’m warming to Harry,’ said the Whisperer. ‘He’s a son of a bitch, and damned if I know if he’s our son of a bitch yet, but right now he’s the only game in town as far as young Master Brooks is concerned.’

‘How comforting.’

‘You’ve got a few surprises in store for you, Oliver. For me too. There’s someone else out there, or something. Leaving little traces behind in people’s minds. She thinks I don’t know about her, but I am powerful, Oliver. That’s why they buried me so deep beneath the earth. No special torc suit for me.’ The Whisperer’s normally sibilant voice had risen to a screech, the background reality of the tenements surrounding Bonegate wavering under the lashing fury of his temper. ‘No fun and games with the wild bunch for the poor old Whisperer. No midnight walks through Middlesteel’s wide boulevards for me. No moonlight. No cold evening air!’

‘Stop it,’ Oliver shouted. ‘My mind!’

Fading away, the dream storm died down as the Whisperer collapsed sobbing on the gallows platform. ‘I’m not predictable, Oliver. That’s why they fear me, that’s why they’ve got me surrounded by a dozen interlocking cursewalls, that’s why they use a trained hound to drag the drugged slop they feed me into my cell.’

Oliver watched rapt with a mixture of fascination, horror and pity as the Whisperer started to pull himself across the platform, his club-footed shuffle becoming a rhythm from his childhood only he could hear. ‘Do a little dance, do a little dance.’

‘What will you do, Whisperer,’ said Oliver, ‘if they catch me and the doomsman stretches my neck at the gallows?’

‘Don’t say that, Oliver,’ the Whisperer hissed. ‘The memory of last night’s roast beef is still so fresh in your skull. So clear. Ah, now I see what you’re trying to do. Distracting me the way you’d dangle string in front of a kitten.’

‘That beef sure tasted good though,’ said Oliver, sitting down on the edge of the hangman’s platform.

The Whisperer arranged himself alongside Oliver. It was difficult to tell if the feybreed had a sitting position or not. ‘I could almost bear my prison, Oliver, if it was not for the Special Guard. All the beautiful people, all the pretty-pretty boys and girls, eating the best, their fey gifts trotted out on call for the state. Like a basket of pampered, indulged pets. I used to visit their dreams, Oliver, in the early days. But now it’s just a little more than I can take.’

‘They wanted me to join the legion,’ said Oliver. ‘To put a worldsinger’s control torc around my neck.’

‘Pretty cat needs a collar,’ said the Whisperer. ‘You think my father didn’t promise that for me when he hauled me to Middlesteel on the back of his cart? I trade messages for all the prisoners trapped in Hawklam Asylum, like a one-fey crystalgrid network. There’s hardly a soul penned in here that wasn’t expecting the finest steak and long lazy days of muscle-pit oil massages. You’d be surprised how normal-looking some of the condemned are down here. But if your powers can’t be turned on and off like a tap on a jinn barrel …’

The dreamscape started to fade. Oliver was waking up.

‘I’ll mind the shop, Oliver Brooks,’ said the Whisperer, once more back in his underground cell. ‘You just mind yourself with that devious jigger, Harry Stave.’

‘You need the hat,’ said Harry. ‘Trust me.’

The Chaunting Lay was moored four miles from Turnhouse, tied up outside a tavern at the back end of crown parkland – like everything else in Jackals, in the king’s name but belonging to the people. Coaches and fours were scattered across the grass, families from the town with checkerboard picnic blankets enjoying the Circleday afternoon.

‘Why do I need it, Harry?’ said Oliver, adjusting the cap. ‘I thought you said the all-seeing eye in the sky would have its attention elsewhere.’

Harry winked at the boy. ‘A little paranoia is never unhealthy.’

Oliver looked around the busy tavern yard, canteen tables crowded with navvies from the waterway clearance board. There had not been a crown park in the Hundred Locks district – the nearest one was in Beggarsmead, far outside the distance of his registration order. That was well and truly shot to pieces now.

‘Lots of people here,’ said Oliver. ‘How are we going to find your man?’

‘Not a man, Oliver. A woman. And crowds are good, lots of movement and extraneous detail – like a good cloth cap – to keep a surveillant and their transaction engine on their toes.’

They found their lady sitting on a stool outside a covered box-wagon, the kind normally found at country fairs hawking baldness remedies of a dubious provenance. She had a bottle of jinn on her left side and balls of wool piled on the right. She was carefully knitting a child-sized sweater.

‘Mother,’ said Harry, as she looked up. ‘More grandchildren on the way?’

‘She’s your mother?’ Oliver looked in disbelief at the grizzled old woman.

The old woman jabbed a knitting needle towards Oliver. ‘If you’re looking for the mare that birthed Harry Stave, you can just look on, dearie. My children are all married off and in respectable trades.’

‘Oliver, this is Damson Loade,’ said Harry. ‘Mother to her friends.’

She chuckled and took a swig of the jinn through a largely toothless mouth. ‘On account of a lucky strike I made, mining silver in the colonies.’

Oliver made a little bow. ‘Mother Loade.’

‘You’re a little cleaner than this reprobate’s usual travelling companions,’ said Mother.

‘A fine one to talk you are,’ said Harry. ‘You forgot to mention the reason you were in Concorzia was by way of a transportation hulk.’

‘Details,’ said the old woman. ‘The doomsman may have given me the boat, but a little silver buys a lot of forgiveness in Jackals. Enough to set up in business with Mister Locke as master gunsmiths to the nobility of Middlesteel and the twenty counties.’

‘Loade and Locke,’ said Oliver. ‘I used to see your details advertised at the back of my uncle’s copies of Field and Fern.’

‘A privilege for which Dock Street charges handsomely, dearie,’ said Mother. ‘Now then, Harry. I don’t normally do house calls, not least because that chinless wonder of a partner of mine is liable to have lost the deeds to the shop at the gaming tables by the time I get back.’

‘Sorry, Mother,’ said Harry. ‘I’m in a bit of bother.’

‘When aren’t you, boy?’ said Mother. ‘She picked up a folded copy of The Middlesteel Illustrated News from behind her stool. ‘Page twelve, towards the bottom.’

Harry leafed through the newspaper. ‘Hundred Locks slayings most foul as feybreed child and escaped felon murder constables and family guardians.’

‘What!’ Oliver choked. ‘They’re saying we killed them. What about the bodies of the toppers at the hall?’

‘Strangely absent,’ said Harry, ‘from this story. But then the Court’s got as many editors on the payroll as Dock Street has.’

‘I picked up a more detailed summary from my drop,’ said Mother. ‘You’re on the disavowed list, Harry. They say you’ve gone rogue. Every whistler from here to Loch Granmorgan is on orders to turn you in.’

‘Mother, this is horse manure,’ said Harry. ‘Someone in the Court’s been turned, but it isn’t me.’

‘You’re a rascal, Harry,’ said Mother. ‘But I believe you. Not because you’re a straight die, but because I don’t see how you could possibly turn a coin out of this mess.’

‘Nice to know you have such faith in me,’ said Harry. ‘Did the drop say which wolftakers you’re to give assistance to?’

Mother nodded. ‘Wolf Seven.’

‘Jamie bleeding Wildrake. I don’t know whether to be flattered or insulted. Someone up there has got a sense of humour.’

‘Stay off the big crown roads, Harry,’ said Mother. ‘The crushers have got blood machines set up at some of the toll cottages, they’re testing for you. Ham Yard is like a wasp’s nest with a burning rag stuffed down it.’

‘Those two jokers back at Hundred Locks were real policemen?’ said Harry. ‘That’s a turn up for the books. I had them pegged as toppers with counterfeit inspector brass. What’s the world coming to when you can’t trust a crusher?’

‘Complicates things,’ said Mother.

‘Yes it does,’ Harry agreed. ‘The blood machines won’t do Ham Yard any good though. My records were given a right old hocus when I joined the Court. My blood code on the census belongs to a poulterer called Jeremiah Flintwinch who died of syphilis twenty years back.’

Mother jerked a thumb in Oliver’s direction. ‘And his blood code? You can leave the boy with me, Harry. Safer for the both of you.’

‘I do have a name,’ Oliver protested.

‘And a good one at that,’ said Harry. ‘The station that got rolled up was run by Titus Brooks. Mother, meet Oliver Brooks, as in the son of Phileas.’

‘Phileas Brooks,’ said Mother. ‘Now there’s a name to conjure with. Bloody Circle, dearie, that’s a lot to live up to.’

‘There seems to be no shortage of people in the kingdom aiming to make sure I don’t,’ said Oliver.

The old woman got up and stretched her arms, ‘I can see it now, Harry. Like listening to Phileas’s ghost talking. Well, boy, let’s see if old Beth can help you even the odds a little. Now, where’s that useless beanpole of an assistant of mine?’

As if on cue a young apprentice turned up with a tray of hams wrapped in wax paper.

‘Creakle, I told you to lay in victuals, not to buy the store.’

‘Of course, damson. Sorry, damson. I was delayed by the crowds from the county fair.’

‘Delayed by a tot of Puttenland cider, by the looks of you, Creakle. Now open the door to the wagon, we’ve got clients to attend to.’

‘Very good, damson.’

Inside the wagon a workbench and counter had been squeezed in between dozens of tiny cupboards. It was just large enough to accommodate the four of them at the same time, Mother sitting down while the others stood.

‘Alright,’ Mother said. ‘Harry, your pleasure?’

‘Something discreet, small enough to fit under a coat, but large enough to pack a punch. Not a long-arm, but it might need range.’

‘And young Master Brooks?’

Harry looked at Oliver. ‘Did Titus ever take you out hunting or the like?’

Oliver shook his head. ‘We didn’t have any guns at Seventy Star Hall. Uncle used to say that a man’s mind was his best weapon. Guns just give you a false bravery – make you behave stupidly.’

‘He didn’t like them, Oliver,’ said Harry. ‘But never confuse disliking fighting with not being able to fight. He kept a pistol in a secret compartment in his desk. Much good that it did him in the end.’

‘That old Tennyson and Bounder?’ said Mother. ‘You’d have better luck spitting at an enemy. He should have let me make him a proper pistol. Circle knows, I made the offer often enough.’

‘We all get sentimental about things, Mother,’ said Harry. ‘They were all the go when I was a boy.’

‘Oh, sir,’ said Mother’s apprentice. ‘When you were a boy? Leaaf addict were you, sir? Oh, a Tennyson and Bounder, they belong behind the glass in a museum.’

Harry looked at the young assistant with a glimmer of irritation in his eyes. ‘You like guns, old stick?’

‘Oh, sir. I do. All sorts. Duelling pistols, gas guns, mail-coach pieces. Special commissions for navy officers, long-arms for the gamekeeper, but I have a particular fondness for ladies’ weapons sir. Nice delicate pieces, sir. The sort of thing you can tuck into a purse or under a skirt.’

Mother rolled her eyes at Harry. ‘We apprenticed Creakle as an arrangement of a debt with one of Locke’s gambling companions.’

‘Well then, apprentice, what would you recommend for my friend here who has never shot before?’

The odd young man moved over to Oliver and started feeling his arm, sizing up his height, weight and balance. ‘Never shot, sir? Not often we get a virgin through the doors at Loade and Locke. Something flared I think, sir, something with a bit of heft to make sure it doesn’t jerk around. Would you like a bit of heft, sir? No need for customization, just something to get you going, something to set you off, something off the peg.’

He opened one of the drawers, rummaged around, and drew out a black pistol with a bell-ended barrel. ‘Our boatsman model, sir. Intended for the salty sea dog, the gentleman of the ocean, where the yaw and pitch of the waves renders accuracy obsolete. Not good for long range, but should you let off your weapon at a close distance, sir, you will find the results are quite devastating.’

Harry signed his approval of the choice for Oliver. ‘You need to fire that, Oliver, do me the favour of making sure I’m standing behind you at the time.’

Mother pulled out a couple of drawers and began scattering parts across the work counter – barrels, chambers, hammers, clockwork igniters. She began to run her fingers across the pieces, muttering instructions to her assistant, sending him scuttling off into the dark recesses of the wagon for some part or another. When she was happy with her selection, Mother began assembling the parts, slipping pieces together, sometimes reaching for a set of fine watchmaker’s tools. Her old fingers seemed to shrug off age as they danced across the flat surface, adjusting, tinkering, pressing pieces of clockwork against her ear and listening to the whirr and click of each mechanism. The gun began to take shape before Oliver’s eyes, a square blocky pistol with a long barrel.

Harry looked on with interest, appreciative of Mother’s craft. ‘You’re using a Catosian breech ejector.’

‘Nothing but the best, Harry. Talk while I work. I like to hear chatter. Dig out some charges for young master Brooks.’

Mother’s apprentice produced a bag of crystal bullets and passed them across to Harry. ‘Did they grow blow-barrel trees in Hundred Locks, Oliver?’

‘No. There was talk of setting up an orchard a few years ago, but the voters in the town got the permissions refused. Said it was too dangerous.’

Harry held up a glass shell in front of the oil lamp, gripping it between his thumb and finger. ‘A bullet is blown by a glassmaker in pretty much the same way as nature grows the seed-barrels on the tree. Two chambers filled with sap, separated by a thin membrane. Each sap by itself is harmless, but mix the two and you’ll lose a hand in the explosion.’

‘Someone in Claynark died when they were hit by a seed-barrel from a wild tree. They found the sapling five miles away,’ said Oliver.

‘A mature tree can blast its seed-barrel up to twenty miles,’ said Harry. ‘When you trigger your pistol, the hammer mechanism strikes and shatters the weak point in the shell’s glass casing, breaks the mixing chamber and ignites the charge.’

‘Oh sir,’ said the assistant. ‘The crack, boom and whine of a bullet, it’s like a symphony. Does the young sir know the rules?’

‘You press the trigger and nothing happens, Oliver, that’s a misfire. Never turn around and show the gun to anyone whose life you value. Hold the gun away from you, break it in the middle like this, then pull the lever on the side to eject the charge,’ said Harry. ‘If you need to clear a used charge manually, take the rod off the side of the gun and push it out and down the barrel. Never use your hand. Blow-barrel residue can burn through your fingers; that’s why the charge is blown crystal, not cast metal. When you’re on the field of battle, be careful where you step. A charge that hasn’t fired is likely to have been blown too strong in the glassworks, jettisoned with a crack that can shatter when you step on it, taking off your boot – with foot attached.’

‘Never skimp on the charges, dearie,’ said Mother as she worked. ‘You can’t afford to buy cheap ones. Shoddy crystal’s killed more soldiers than accurate fire ever did. Cheap crystal will shatter in your gun when you don’t want it to; you take a wallop against your charge sack and your friends will be scraping pieces of you off the grass for your coffin.’

‘Same reason you never walk around with your gun charged. You wait until you’re looking trouble in the face, then break the gun and load,’ Harry said. ‘In polite company, like a shoot or a hunt, you walk around with your gun broken in the middle so everyone knows your weapon is safe.’

Mother held up her nearly assembled pistol to the light. ‘It’ll take you a while to learn the glassmaker’s marks on the charges, dearie. Quick way to tell cheap crystal is to check if one half of the charge has the sap a different colour or not. Natural blow-barrel seed sap is as clear as water, both left chamber and right chamber. A good gun maker will add dye to the liquid on one side or the other. I use red dye on right-chamber sap. Cheap gunsmiths that sell to fools won’t spend the extra coin on the dye.’

Harry passed Oliver a crystal charge. There was a hollow in the glass shell, forward of the two explosive sap-filled chambers – packed with dozens of lead balls. ‘Your blunderbuss uses these; they’re called buckshot charges. Not good on range, but then I haven’t got the time to make a marksman of you. You let off that bessy and the charge will spread the shot in front of you. Ain’t intended to discriminate, you understand?’

Oliver looked at his bell-barrelled gun. Now he understood what Uncle Titus had meant. The false bravery seeped from the weapon like warmth from a hearth. Next time some bent Ham Yard crusher tried to slip a noose around his neck, he had better come armed with more than a Sleeping Henry and a police cutlass. ‘I understand, Harry. No friends in front of me when I fire.’

‘Young sir,’ said Mother’s apprentice. ‘You are a fast learner. What a magnificent piece you have. Quite the young duellist now, sir.’

Mother passed Harry his newly assembled pistol. He began to check it, looking down the barrel and sizing up its weight in each hand. The old woman looked at Oliver. ‘If you ever travel abroad, dearie, you might come across what we in the trade call suicide guns.’

‘Suicide guns?’

‘Two-barrel guns, tri-barrels, quad-barrels, even accordion guns. Stay clear of them. You load more than one charge in a gun, the first charge goes off and weakens the crystal in the other shells. Each extra shot and the chance of the gun exploding on you rises real fast. My first husband died in Concorzia that way when he was called out packing a tribarrel. Never could shoot worth a damn anyway.’

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

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.

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